


Mercury

by PolarisAmane



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Kara Danvers Needs a Hug, Kara and Lena working their shit out, Kelly being awesome, Lena Luthor Needs a Hug, Lena has a lot of guilt, Post Season 5, Smut, Some Fluff, Then more angst, Things will get worse before they get better, all aboard the self-flagellation train - woo woo, background dansen, in which I take all the dumb bits of S5 and try and make them work!, mild violence, seriously they have so much stuff they need to talk about, slow slow burn, warning for mild kara/william it doesn't last long tho
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:08:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 46,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25811110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PolarisAmane/pseuds/PolarisAmane
Summary: Crisis. Leviathan. LexLena.The past year had been pretty rough for Kara, and even though Lex is dead and Leviathan defeated the hits just keep on rolling in. The world thinks that Lex died a hero, saving them all from Leviathan. Lillian is free and causing trouble. VR addiction is still rampant and now, just as Kara’s finally finding time to get her life back to something resembling normalcy – to work, to date, and somehow find a way to repair the broken pieces of her relationship with Lena - an unforeseen after effect of Obsidian Platinum is causing previous users to lose touch with reality.Kara and Lena are going to need to work together to defeat this newest threat. But to do that, first they’ll need to fix what’s been broken between themAlien threats, an over-protective big sister, society’s expectation to date that guy that buys her coffee, the DEO running rampant, and the fragility of earned trust, Kara’s going to have to deal with it all.
Relationships: Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor
Comments: 90
Kudos: 171





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Picking up where season 5 left off and attempting to do something with that, uh, trainwreck. This is gonna be a long 'un so buckle up kiddos and sit back and enjoy Kara and Lena be awkward, emotional and so very _very_ dumb.

On an otherwise unspectacular Monday Kara capped off the beginning of her week by catching a bullet.

The evening was wearing on, the sharp brightness of the sun had faded to wine stain pinks over the city skyline. Kara floated high above the city, her cape gently tugging at her shoulders as it rippled in the evening air. Her bangs were growing out and were at that annoying stage where they were constantly in her eyes and she was trying to resist the urge to cut them again.

The city was winding down and below her the tail end of the days return home commute was buzzing. It was peaceful. Difficult to believe that only a couple of weeks prior the city had been in upheaval. There was still signs of the destruction caused by Leviathan and by Lex and Lillian’s final play, not that the general public knew about the Luthor’s and their bid to wipe out all aliens and most humans along with them. The DEO was gone, destroyed by Rama Khan, and the rubble was still in the process of being cleared away. The LuthorCorp building was undergoing repairs, scaffold clung to the side of it and gave it an eerily skeletal appearance against the dying daylight, a grotesque reminder of how close they’d come to losing. 

The sun dipped lower over the horizon and the temperature was blissfully receding with it. Kara closed her eyes and tilted her head, allowing the sounds of her city to wash over her. The traffic. The people talking. Music, so much music playing and people singing along. She could hear dogs barking and the soft footfalls of cats as they padded about. A couple were arguing in their apartment. A baby crying. Another gurgling and laughing. All the usual sounds of her city when it was safe, when things were normal.

She smiled and basked in it. Let all those good warm feelings fill up her chest, push up against her expanding ribs. After this past year she deserved a small selfish moment to enjoy the peace, this normalcy that allowed her the space to focus on her regular boring problems. Problems like having an asshole boss, Noonan’s no longer knowing her coffee order, or thinking up excuses for why she needed to end her date with William early. Normal regular human problems.

She sighed, shoulders sagging as the energy dropped from her. William was a whole basket of problems all on his own. Another date completed: another dinner and drinks and then the slow walk home, followed by the chaste kiss goodnight as he left her outside her apartment. She’d fired off a quick text to Alex to let her know she’d got home safe, that the date had been good, and then she’d taken off out the window her mind swirling with… with… Nothing. A frustrating amount of nothing. Where were the sparks? The trembles and the butterflies? Where were the moments where her heart would feel like it would jackhammer through her ribs? She liked William - she _did_ \- but something wasn’t quite clicking and no matter how hard she tried it just wasn’t happening.

There was a nagging little nugget at the back of Kara’s mind that maybe, just maybe, she had damaged her ability to feel these things. That the excitement of a new relationship was just something that she wasn’t going to feel again. Maybe this was part of growing up. Maybe after everything she went through with Mon-El she had broken that part of herself and it would never fully heal. 

The distant screech of tyres followed by the dull thunk and crunch of metal hitting metal tore her from her thoughts. Her head snapped towards the noise. It might be nothing, but she wasn’t about to risk that. She took off over the city. In a matter of seconds she was flitting over National City stadium and hovering over Lorraine Ave. and looking down at a car that had rear-ended another. She should leave it to the NCPD, this was something they were more than capable of handling. But there was an uneasiness stirring in her gut, something telling her to stay and to watch. She had learnt a long time ago to trust her gut.

Both drivers were out of their vehicles and both were red-faced and yelling at one another, neither of them aware that she was hovering above them. The driver who had been hit reached behind himself, hand into the back of his pants, and pulled a gun. Kara moved. Before the first echo of the gunshot could ring out she was stood between them and held the still hot, crushed bullet in the palm of her hand.

The perpetrator’s eyes widened and his jaw dropped almost comically low as he stared at Kara - at Supergirl - standing before him with her cape billowing out dramatically holding his recently fired bullet. Kara lowered her arm and let the bullet drop to the ground. He turned his gaze to the gun in his hand and stared at it in horror.

“Oh god. Oh god.” The gun slipped from his grasp and clattered to the ground. He put his shaking hands to his head, fingers clawing into his hair. “Oh god!”

Kara turned from him to the man behind her and was met with an equally wide eyed and slack jawed gaze.

“Supergirl?” He gasped. He took a step towards her then faltered, one foot hanging in the air mid-step before he stumbled. His trembling hands reached out for her, hovered between them like he wanted to touch her but was afraid she wasn’t real or she that she was real and he would be burned if he did touch her. “Thank you. Thank you.”

“Are you okay?” She asked.

“Yes, thanks to you, yes,” he gushed, his head jerked back and forth in frantic nods. His fear and nervousness were beginning to give way to excitement, his eyes bright with it. It wasn’t an unusual reaction to her saving someone, all too often it was a precursor to shock.

Kara cast her gaze about them. A small crowd had gathered, already there were those with their phones out and filming the scene as it unfolded. Kara put her hand on the man’s shoulder and looked him right in the eye. His heartbeat was through the roof. “Can you tell me your name?”

“Kevin,” he replied instantly. “Kevin Kevins - No… No, that’s not - I mean.”

“It’s okay Kevin.” She gave him her most reassuring smile. Reassuring smiles were something she excelled at and it worked a treat on him. His heart rate was still going five thousand miles per minute but his eyes had lost that manic glassy gleam and some of the tension leaked from his body. She could hear the police sirens approaching already on their way to the scene, the sound of the officers talking over the radio and telling her they were headed this way. She gave his shoulder a quick squeeze. “The police are on their way. You good?”

“I’m good.”

She patted his shoulder and turned from him and towards the shooter, dropping her smile and standing that bit taller, head up and shoulders back. He had fallen to his knees and was slumped forward still holding his head in his hands. The dropped gun lay on the ground seemingly forgotten.

“Bit of an overreaction for a little fender-bender, don’t you think?” She placed her foot on the gun, just in case he tried something stupid, and put her hands to her hips, looking down at him. He was shaking. His shoulders violently trembled as he tried to heave in breaths through wet sobs. He turned his face up to her. His eyes bulged, the vein in forehead pulsating with every erratic beat of his heart.

“I forgot,” he managed to say, his chin wobbling and his voice shaking as badly as his shoulders. “S-Supergirl, I forgot.”

She frowned. “Forgot what?”

“That this is real.”

/\/\/\/\

“Kurt Trammel!” Brainy announced as he spun round on his chair to face them. His face was cast in an ominous blue glow from the poor lighting in the Tower. “Works at LuthorCorp -”

“Of course he does,” Nia muttered. She crossed her arms almost defensively and leaned back against the bench. 

It was the next day and Kara had called them in after spending a mostly sleepless night running Kurt Trammel’s words through her head. Andrea was going to give her and Nia hell for being late to work but this needed to be looked into. She’d texted William and told him that she and Nia were working on something and to cover for them, but that wasn’t going to be enough. With the ongoing investigation into Obsidian North, and the very public protests against them, Andrea’s mood lately had been nothing short of apocalyptic. 

“A number cruncher from accounts, no prior convictions, father of two, divorced and recently engaged,” Brainy continued, and then paused thoughtfully. “To someone else. He didn’t get re-engaged to his previous wife whom he was divorced from.”

Nia scrunched her face up and turned to stare at Brainy. “Thanks for the clarification.”

Brainy frowned and opened his mouth to reply.

“No history of violence?” Kara said before him and Nia could get into it. 

Things between them were… weird. Sometimes it was all longing looks and soft words, others it was frosty silences and sarcastic barbs from Nia while Brainy stood there looking wounded. It was impossible to tell which way it was going to go. Kara had resolved to keep out of it. They’d got Brainy back, given him a sound telling off for not talking to them and for going off with Lex, and smothered him in hugs because they’d nearly lost him. She wasn’t about to tell Nia how she should feel about Brainy. How she should process that mixed feeling of betrayal and relief to have someone you cared about back in your life. Even if that meant they perhaps weren’t who you thought they were. Even if that meant you’d discovered whole new layers to that person and those layers were dark and awful and that they were capable of being a massive jerk. That was for Nia to deal with and Kara would support her through this. And while supporting her through this she would also somehow figure out a way to be there for Brainy because he was her friend as well, and maybe she hadn’t been as good of a friend as she could have been. Maybe if she’d been a better friend he wouldn’t have tried to play at double agent. She forced herself to purge that thought.

 _I am not responsible for other’s choices. I am not responsible for other’s choices. I am not responsible for other’s choices._ She repeated it like a mantra in her head, in time with her footfalls as she paced around the Tower. If J’onn were here he’d tell her stay still; the speed she was going she was likely to carve a trench into the Tower floor. She missed J’onn; wished he was here with his calming presence and his ability to know exactly what to say. But he was off with M’gann, and they had more than earned their time together. She wasn’t about to call him back just because she had a bad feeling.

“Brainy?” She stopped pacing and looked over at him. He looked confused.

“No prior convictions,” he repeated.

“That doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a history of violence,” Nia pointed out. She had lifted herself up onto the bench and was now perched on the edge, her legs swinging in the air and kicking at nothing.

“True.” Brainy swivelled back around on his chair towards the computer and tapped furiously away on the keyboard. 

With the DEO gone their resources had been severely cut, but they were making do, and with Brainy back on the team they were hardly completely helpless. She was trying not to think about how they were going to fund this whole operation.

“He had an account with Obsidian.” Kelly walked in with Alex in tow, an Obsidian tablet in hand. She stopped next to Kara and tapped her finger across the screen before turning it and handing it over. Kara looked down at the screen and a smiling picture of Kurt Trammel looked back up at her with his account details listed next to his profile pic. “He was part of Obsidian’s Unity Festival,” Kelly explained. “He had been using the lenses since they were first released to general consumers. Unlike some others he never tried to re-enter VR after the servers were taken down.”

“He might not have a history of real world violence but the kind of simulations he liked were, well,” Alex said with a grimace. She folded her arms across her chest and blew out a sharp breath. “He made Grand Theft Auto look like a game for pre-schoolers.”

“Intrusive thoughts. He suffered from them.” Kelly perched herself on the edge of the table next to Nia, throwing her a quick smile. Nia beamed back at her, her whole self lighting up. Alex followed after Kelly, standing next to her. She had been Kelly’s constant shadow these past few weeks, acting more like a bodyguard than a girlfriend, but if Kelly was annoyed by Alex being over-protective then she was keeping it to herself. “Mr. Trammel first used the VR as a means to play out these intrusive thoughts. He describes visceral scenes of violence, of him hurting people who he perceived had wronged him. Having read his statement and going by what you’ve told me, Kara, it looks that he thought he was still in the simulation.”

Kara peered down at the picture of Kurt Trammel staring up at her from the tablet. He looked so normal. Boring even. A thinning hair line, pale blue eyes, a slightly pointed chin. He looked like any other tie wearing office worker. She flicked her finger across the screen and brought up a description of the kind of simulations he had been running. Ones where someone cut in line and he hurt them for it, where a cashier was slightly rude to him, where someone dinged his car. It went on and on, simulation after simulation that all ended with him killing someone in grotesque and violent ways. Kara’s stomach churned. There was a near infinite amount of simulations that he could have chosen to experience and this man, a father of two, had chosen to hurt people. She flicked her finger across the screen again and the picture changed to one of Trammel with two young boys on a boat smiling and squinting in the sun, holding up a recently caught fish.

It shouldn’t surprise her that people would use the simulations for this, but it did. 

She turned to Kelly. “So was this a one off incident or can we expect others to think that they’re still in simulations?”

“I don’t know,” Kelly replied.

“I can run a check on police reports, see if this has happened anywhere else,” Brainy said, spinning round once more on his chair to face them.

Kara’s phone buzzed in her pocket. “Do that,” she said, fishing her phone out and checking it. She frowned at the message from William and then looked up to Nia. “We need to get to Catco. William says he can’t hold Andrea off any longer.”

“Urgh!” Nia slumped. “Can we get coffee and doughnuts on the way?”

“As if I’m going to say no to that.” Kara slipped her phone back in her pocket. She looked back over to Kelly. “Do you still have access to the Obsidian Platinum subscribers?”

“I do.”

That was probably very illegal. “Can you work with Brainy? If he finds any others on police records then I want to see their Platinum files too.”

“Sure.”

“Not that I’m complaining but you’re taking this very seriously,” Alex said.

“I just don’t want this to catch us by surprise.” Kara shrugged. She picked up her bag and slung it over her shoulder. “Hopefully this is a one off but if there are lasting effects to being in the simulations then I want to jump on it. I don’t want to be surprised by someone going full dragon slayer in the reptile house at the zoo.” She turned to Nia. “Ready?”

“Sure.” Nia hopped off the table and followed Kara towards the exit. “Some of us have jobs to go to so we’ll see you losers later,” she called over her shoulder.

“Hey!” Alex yelled after her. “I have a job!”

/\/\/\/\

The mood at Catco was subdued when Kara and Nia sneaked in. Nia made a beeline to her desk with a tray of doughnuts and coffee in hand, heads perking up as she passed by, while Kara went straight to her office, where she hunkered down and pretended like she’s been there for hours now. She sipped her latte while she checked the emails she should have already looked at that morning, pulled her notebook forward and made some vague scribbles in it, the very vision of a model employee.

There was a light tap at the door and she looked up. William stood in the doorway, right arm in a sling still from the gunshot wound he’d got from Eve.

“You are very lucky,” he said. 

“How so?”

He smiled at her and leaned against the door frame, then winced and jerked away as he had leaned against it on his injured side. Kara laughed as he rubbed at his shoulder. He threw an exaggerated scowl at the door frame and moved further into her office.

“Andrea was looking for you and she was on the warpath,” he explained. Kara swallowed. Having a boss who actually paid attention to her comings and goings was going to be a huge problem going forward. “Lucky for you Lena Luthor showed up and they’ve been holed up together in Andrea’s office.”

“Lena’s here?” Kara stood up, chair skittering away behind her. Her stomach swooped low then high, then low again, like it was riding its own personal roller coaster. “Why?”

“Don’t know,” William said with a shrug. “Presumably to catch up. They did go to school together after all and they are looking particularly chummy right now.” His brow furrowed thoughtfully. “You’d think that Luthor would want to avoid Andrea and her negative press. Oblivion North’s stocks are in free fall after what happened at the Platinum launch and because of their involvement with Leviathan. Meanwhile after Lex Luthor’s ‘heroic sacrifice’ LuthorCorp has never looked better.” William rolled his eyes as he said it, still thankfully not believing that Lex was the hero that the world believed him to have been.

Kara grit her teeth. In the eyes of the world Lex had died a hero saving them from Leviathan. It was near impossible to say a word against him, to even suggest that he had been anything less than ideal. Lillian was playing the grieving mother up, talking on tv, giving interviews, and even going as far as to announce plans to unveil a statue in her son’s honour. The media and the public were eating it up. The anger Kara felt put an end to the flip-flopping of her stomach, which was a small mercy. Instead she was tensing every muscle, tensing to the point she was probably clenching internal organs, her stomach now a tight knot.

William moved to her desk and leaned over conspiratorially. “Rumour is that Andrea is looking to sell Catco.”

“What?” Kara looked up sharply, anger forgotten. “Is that why Lena’s here?”

William shrugged. He looked back over his shoulder as though he expected someone to be hovering back there listening in, and then turned back to Kara, smiling softly. “So, last night.”

Kara’s stomach dropped. Like an anvil in a river. Amazing all the different movements her stomach was capable of executing in such a short space of time.

“Last night,” she echoed dumbly. 

“I was hoping we could repeat it.”

“Hmm.” She nodded.

“I have some work I need to take care of tonight but how about brunch tomorrow?”

“Brunch. Brunch is something I can do.”

“Excellent. It’s a date.” His smile widened, pearly whites on full display. “I should get back to my office before Andrea notices I’m gone. She’d probably send HR in here to drag me out.”

Kara laughed loudly. Too loudly, louder than any laugh ever needed to be. Especially for a joke that wasn’t even all that funny. “She would do that.”

William slipped out her office with a final smile and Kara sank back down into her chair, folding herself like an accordion and not caring that she was scrunching up and giving herself twenty chins. Brunch wasn’t a big deal; she could handle brunch with William. All she had to do was drink a coffee and eat some pastries, right? That was simple. Easier than catching a bullet. Why then was dread curdling in her belly? Why did nearly every plan she made with William cause anxiety to thrum in her veins? What was wrong with her?

There was another knock at her door and when she looked up she was greeted by Nia standing there with a wide open mouthed grin and giving her two thumbs up. She side stepped away, never breaking eye contact, manic grin and thumbs up on display until she stepped out of sight. Kara groaned. Nia should not be more excited about Kara’s date with William than Kara was. 

She grabbed her notebook and super-speed scribbled some notes down, pushing thoughts of William and dates out of her mind and occupied herself writing down all her suspicions about Leviathan and Obsidian’s tech, everything she could think of that might have caused Kurt Trammel to lose touch with reality, and then she jotted down what her next move would be if she were to investigate this.

Even if there wasn’t something here for Supergirl to be involved then there might be a story for Kara Danvers.

After making enough notes to get her started she finally turned her attention to the utterly pointless piece Andrea had set her on. Kara sighed as she read over the assignment: _Superhero Work Outs - How to Get a Heroic Body for Summer._ Andrea was clearly punishing her.

She fired off a text to Alex to ask her what her workout routine was, looked up some basic stretches, and hammered together the outline of the piece. Maybe she should also e-mail Kate and ask what her workout was? She was about to fire off an e-mail to organise a model and photo shoot when she reread Andrea’s initial email and, with a sinking feeling, realised that Andrea expected her to be the one in the shoot. Kara groaned and rested her forehead on the desk. Andrea was definitely - _definitely_ \- punishing her.

With a heavy sigh she got up, drained the last of her now lukewarm latte, chucked the cup in the trash, and left her office a woman on a mission. 

A sneaky mission since she didn’t want to be seen by Lena.

She took the long way round the bullpen towards Andrea’s office, ignoring the perplexed look Nia shot her. No one else paid her any mind. Kara Danvers was acting weird? Just another Tuesday.

She sidled up towards Andrea’s office, definitely didn’t hide behind a fake plant, and inched her glasses down her nose. A quick x-ray of the office revealed Andrea sat at her desk alone, no Lena in sight, but there were two empty cups and the serving trolley waiting to be taken away. A sure sign that Lena had been there. Kara straightened up and flexed her shoulders, worked out all the imaginary kinks in them, and strode confidently out from behind the fake plant and across into Andrea’s office, closing the door behind her.

Andrea didn’t even look up from her phone. She exhaled long and slow, not even trying to hide her annoyance. Kara could see the tension in her neck, her shoulders. She was perched half off her seat like she was ready to launch herself at any moment. It wasn’t at all how Kara was used to seeing Andrea. Even after everything that had happened with Obsidian and Leviathan she had still carried herself with an air of nonchalance, as if everything was beneath her. Now she looked like a startled animal waiting to see if the noise from the bushes was a predator. Possibly that was just the effect Lena had on her.

“Kara, to what do I owe the dramatic entrance?” Her thumb danced over the screen of her phone.

“I just went over your e-mail.” Kara crossed her arms. “And I have a few concerns I’d like to raise.”

“Such pressing concerns that you felt the need to march into my office? You have my e-mail.” Andrea placed her phone on her desk and slid back into her chair, slowly turning to face Kara. She placed her elbow on the armrest and daintily rested her chin on the back of her hand. She raised both eyebrows and smiled at Kara in such a relaxed arrogant way that Kara clenched her fists tight enough her nails bit into her palms. This was the Andrea she was used to. This was an Andrea who was much easier to deal with.

“Yes. I’m not a model.”

“Clearly.”

She ignored that scathing barb. “And this piece is vapid and will encourage young girls to try to attain unrealistic body types.”

“We’re not aimed at teenagers.”

“Grown women are just as susceptible.”

“It’s clearly not an unrealistic body type though, is it?”

Kara frowned at her. “Most superheroes are aliens with vastly different biology or are enhanced humans.”

“That’s a little insulting to our brave service men and women and our athletes isn’t it?” Andrea said in a reasonable tone. “They are as human as you or I and they manage just fine.”

Kara choked a little on that. Andrea leaned back in her seat, smiling smugly, and Kara’s eyes fell on the medallion she wore. _As human as you or I_ what a joke.

“Kara, sometimes I wonder why it is you work here?” Andrea smiled at her, her smugness smothering whatever concern she was trying to work into her expression. “For someone who was mentored by Cat Grant you have a very mistaken idea of what it is that sells Catco magazines. We are first and foremost a fashion magazine. We truck in celebrity interviews and guides on how to achieve karmic balance in your home or how cultivating an Alstairean garden will bring you good fortune. We tell you what belt goes with your boots, we do not comment on politics or world affairs. We are not hard hitting journalism. You want to write that then move to Metropolis. I hear the Daily Planet is hiring.”

“I’m under contract here.”

Andrea’s smile was positively predatory. “How upsetting for you. Since you’re under contract here then maybe you’ll consider doing your job.”

Kara didn’t budge. She stared at Andrea already knowing that there was no way this tactic was going to work. Andrea’s gaze flickered down Kara and back up her, appraising her and judging her in that way that only someone with Andrea’s wealth and power knew how. 

“Did you even stop to consider why I assigned this piece to you?” When she got no answer Andrea sighed theatrically. “Because I knew you would do it justice. Someone else might have made it a body shaming piece but you’re far too conscionable for that. The reason I want you to be part of the shoot rather than some fitness model is to make is to make it more personal. Contrary to what you seem to believe I am not in the habit of shaming women or in trying to bolster toxic ideas of fitness and what constitutes a healthy image. But Superheroes are in right now and our competitors will be running similar pieces and so we must also. I trust that you will write something empowering rather than damaging. Anything else?”

Kara shuffled her feet. “I’m not comfortable having my picture in the magazine.”

“Tough. Get over it and while you’re getting over it get out of my office.”

Kara did. She spun on her heel and barrelled out the office, bristling. She needed sugar. She needed sugar and carbs. Head down she made straight for the break room, not looking where she was going. She rounded the corner towards the elevators and nearly barged right into someone. 

“Oh!” Was the startled yell and Kara’s hands shot out and grabbed the arms of whoever she’d nearly knocked down. Then she dropped her hands like she’d been burned when she looked up and was met with startled green eyes and the best pair of eyebrows Kara had ever known to exist.

“Kara?”

“Lena?” Kara stepped back. She adjusted her glasses as she looked over Lena, took in her pale skin and her wide eyes, the deep red of her lipstick and the pink tinge on her cheeks. “What are you - I mean, I know what you’re doing here, you’re here to see Andrea, and also that’s none of my business.” Internally she cringed but through sheer force of will, and by clenching her jaw tight enough that she could have bitten through titanium, she managed to not let the cringe physically manifest.

Lena regarded her with that sad hopeful expression that she wore too often around Kara. “I did come to see Andrea,” Lena said slowly, carefully. “But because I was already here I thought that I would also see you.”

“Well you’ve seen me!” Kara said cheerfully, and there was no keeping herself from cringing this time.

Lena’s face fell. Her shoulders curled forward and she turned her head. Her lips parted and she pulled in a short, shaky breath.

“I mean.” Kara coughed. “What can I do for you?”

“I just thought I’d call in and say hello.” She straightened up, pushing her shoulders back, injecting a bit of steel into her posture, as she turned to face Kara. “Just to say hello.”

“Okay.” Kara stared at her and Lena stared right back. They kept on staring at each other, neither blinking, as though they’d accidentally got themselves into a staring competition that Kara definitely wasn’t going to lose. Lena’s lips parted and Kara heard the barely audible intake of breath. She narrowed her eyes, waiting for whatever Lena was about to say, muscles tensing as she found herself leaning forward.

Someone cleared their throat and she and Lena sprang back. Ben from digital media stared at them both; he made a motion to get past them

“Sorry Ben.” Kara stepped back as did Lena, murmuring her own apology. Once he’d squeezed between them and was on his way Kara turned towards Lena, she pointed towards the general direction of her office. “I need to -”

“How are you?”

“- get going. Oh.” Her hand hovered uselessly in the air between them.

“Sorry. You’re obviously busy.”

“No, I mean yes I am, but its okay. I’m behind on my latest piece and that is entirely my own fault.”

“I look forward to reading it.”

Kara fiddled with her glasses. “Yeah, I don’t think it’s really gonna be anything worth reading so don’t get your hopes up. I need to go research some gyms and find one that’s willing to let me do a shoot in there.”

“I have a gym,” she blurted. She paused, her eyes widening as though in surprise, like she hadn’t expected to speak. She cleared her throat. “LuthorCorp owns a gym, a chain of gyms really, and there’s one here. If you want then I can have the manager e-mail you some details.”

“I couldn’t.”

“Why not?” Lena challenged, her confidence growing. Her lips curled into a familiar smile, teasing, a little cocky, her eyes lighting up, and Kara couldn’t tell if her heart was fluttering or being pummelled around her ribcage like a pinball. “I have a gym and you need a gym. I assure you that it’s up to code and fitted out with state of the art equipment.”

“Yeah? You frequent this gym often?”

“Never been in my life.”

Kara laughed. She pushed her glasses needlessly up her nose and bit her lip. She rocked on her feet and looked up at Lena and was met with a soft smile and hopeful eyes, and just like that her laughter and ease sank down. It was too soon and she was still…. Not angry. Disappointed? It had only been a few weeks since Lena had come back with her apologies and her attempts at explaining what she was doing, and Kara still hadn’t set aside the time to parse that. She blew out a breath and forced herself to calm down, to ignore the way her blood felt like it was jumping through her veins rather than following a steady healthy flow. It was still too soon to not feel awkward with Lena, but even if she was still unsure of Lena and her own feelings she could take this.

“Okay. You’ve twisted my arm.” It would save her spending a few hours trying to find a suitable gym.

Lena looked relieved. “I’ll have the details sent to you ASAP.” 

“I appreciate it.” They were back to staring at one another, only this time Lena still had that small hopeful smile. “I uh…” Kara pointed past Lena. “I should get back to work.”

“Of course. It was nice to see you.” Lena stepped aside and cast her eyes up to meet Kara’s. “You look well.”

Kara nodded and answered with a hum, like the big coward she was. She slipped past Lena and went straight to the elevators, clicking the call button a little more forceful than necessary.

“Kara? Isn’t your office that way?”

Kara looked back over her shoulder at Lena’s perplexed expression. “Sure is. But you can’t write an article on an empty stomach.” The elevator binged and the doors opened, Kara slipped inside and threw Lena an all too bright smile. Lena’s brows twisted in confusion as Kara kept up the beaming smile as the doors closed and cut Lena from her vision. As soon as they were closed and Kara felt the elevator move she sagged forward, letting all the air whoosh out of her lungs. She banged her head against the closed doors, did it again for good measure, smashing her glasses against the bridge of her nose, and then with the remaining air she had let warbled out a noise that sounded suspiciously like, “gaaaaaah…” against the polished doors fogging them all up.

Someone cleared their throat behind her, and with her stomach sinking down to her boots, Kara looked back over her shoulder to meet the gaze of a very uncomfortable looking digital media Ben.

“Hi Ben,” She said, cheek still smooshed against the door.

“You’re so weird, Danvers.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Everyone I speak to wants to offer me their condolences on Lex. I still haven’t figured out what I’m supposed to do with them.” 
> 
> Kara didn’t have an answer for her. She readjusted her glasses and avoided Lena’s gaze. Her stomach churned uncomfortably, a mixture of hunger and guilt and so many other feelings that she didn’t want to examine too closely. It wasn’t fair. She shouldn’t have been feeling guilty about Lex.
> 
> “I was about to call my driver to come get me,” Lena said and she cast a wary look back towards the doors and the waiting vultures. “Think I’m going to need to call security as well.”
> 
> Kara bounced her leg. She had checked on Lena, she wasn’t about to have a break down, so she should clearly leave her to get on with her day. She probably had work to get back to and had a whole team of people to get her back to that work. It was not Kara’s place to swoop in and rescue Lena from every little inconvenience life threw at her. But there was something about the stiffness of Lena’s shoulders and the drawn pale expression on her face that made it so Kara couldn’t bring herself to leave her. She pushed her glasses back up her nose. “Let me change out of my workout gear and I’ll get you out of here.”

Rhett Novak had a firm handshake to go with his, admittedly, impressively huge forearms, and didn’t spare Kara’s hand from a manly competitive squeeze just because she was a woman. Kara smiled and, because she had a charitable soul, didn’t slowly crush his hand as she returned his handshake. Behind her the CatCo crew were finishing setting up for the photo shoot. Kara had spent her morning being gently berated by Dana, Catco’s resident hair and make-up artist (“All that crap you eat and not a single pimple?”), and then had been forced into wearing what will Luthor Fitness’s next seasons sports line. She’d then been ushered to the gym and denied any and all doughnuts in her way.

“Welcome to FlexLex, Miss Danvers,” Rhett said with a big toothy smile. He tossed back his sun bleached hair and put his hands to his hips in a fair imitation of The Superhero Pose. He had a wide boyish smile to go with his square jaw and perfectly symmetrical muscles, his tanned arms on display; he finished up his look with the sun baked expression of a man that worked out at the beach. “Miss Luthor says that she would consider it a personal favour that we take good care of you.”

Kara glanced around the gym. It was all sleek and shiny with state of the art equipment, a multitude of screens showing the news and sports and Luthor related adverts, and plenty of staff milling about to help those working out. It was also nearly empty. She had expected it to be full; of the two Luthor owned gyms in the city this one was slap bang in the middle of the University district and clearly geared towards the students. But there was hardly anyone here. Two girls lazed about on the bikes chatting away and one young man at the weights looking to be working on a hernia with the way he was grunting and straining, and that was it. Most the staff looked bored. 

FlexLex was part of the Luthor Fitness brand; gyms, equipment, clothing and athletic sponsorship. Kara couldn’t remember L-Corp being involved with any sports; everything was geared towards tech as far as she could remember. 

“Call me Kara. Does Lena use the gym?”

Rhett blanched at Kara’s casual use of Lena’s first name. He dropped his arms to his side, finally relaxing and not trying to show off his physique. 

“No, not that I’ve seen.” He cleared his throat and threw Kara an appraising look. He’d been expecting Kara to just be a reporter and not to be on first name basis with Lena. Or maybe he was just personally insulted that Lena didn’t frequent his gym. Kara had seen the speculations about Lena, the articles. If she had been a minor celebrity back on Earth-38 then here, as the younger sister of the world’s most loved man, she was something else entirely. There were endless gossip pieces about Lena’s personal life, pictures of her shaking hands with world leaders, selfies with big name actors at movie premiers, candid shots of her leaving gigs or the theatre, she graced magazine covers, was a fashion icon, had a whole program named after and supported by her to encourage girls to get into STEM. That wasn’t even touching on the fact that was picture after picture of her with Supergirl that Kara had no memory of. The Internet was rife with rumours about Supergirl’s relationship with Lena, and there were way too many Twitter threads analysing every single picture of them. 

And while the knowledge of the existence of those conversations made Kara squirm they paled in comparison to the skin crawling feeling of knowing that there were also threads and hashtags dedicated to her and Lex, and an insane amount of people who thought that they must have been in a relationship. Every time she was reminded of it she felt like throwing up.

“How about we do a brief interview while the guys get set up?” Kara said. Rhett nodded and gestured for Kara to follow him. He led her past the gym equipment and nodded greetings to the few people who were here. “How long you worked here?”

“Two years now. Mr. Luthor interviewed me himself.” He sounded proud of the fact. “We’re the largest of the FlexLex gyms, there’s two set up here in National City, and at least one in every major city.”

“Not Metropolis.”

He paused at that, his smile fading. “There used to be one but it never took off. Don’t know why, maybe because everything in Metropolis is obsessed with Superman?” He grinned suddenly. “We’ve had Supergirl here before.”

“Have you?” Kara couldn’t help bouncing with excitement at that. 

“Yup.” Rhett practically skipped over to the wall where a plethora of framed photos were proudly displayed. He pointed to one in particular and Kara narrowed her eyes as she took it in. There she was, in full Supergirl gear, lifting the entire weight rack with one hand and a comically stern looking Lex Luthor sitting calmly on a bench with the other. 

“Oh. Wow.” Kara’s her brief excitement fled in the face of the picture. She’d never done this. She had no memory of this. She didn’t recognise this woman in her suit in this picture who looked smugly thrilled to be in the presence of Lex Luthor. “That must have been some day,” she said woodenly.

“Sure was.” Rhett smiled sadly, eyes soft as they took in the picture. “He was a great man.”

Bile burned the back of Kara’s throat. She couldn’t speak, she wouldn’t be able to keep up the charade, her anger would be too obvious; she clenched her jaw and curled her hands into fists, forcing herself to nod. Hopefully Rhett would take her silence for grief.

“He saved us all,” Rhett continued, and there was awe in his voice. “Saved us from Leviathan, sacrificed himself to save us. It was just like him, he was the greatest hero this Earth had. I don’t know what we’re going to do without him.”

They’d stopped Lex but all too often it felt as though they had lost. Kara forced herself to take a breath. “Should we continue? How about you tell me about the gym and the work out your going to put me through?”

“Sure thing.”

He took her on a meandering tour around the gym, talking about what classes they had and what was popular, how many personal trainers and fitness specialists they had on staff, pointing out the state of the art equipment. He peppered the conversation with personal anecdotes, never dropping names of their more wealthy and notorious clientele, but giving Kara enough hints that if she wanted she could connect the dots. Rhett was charming, personable, and clearly knew his stuff. The gym had picked well for who to represent them. By the time they made it back to where the CatCo crew had set up he was explaining the growing popularity among people to achieve what they thought of as the Superhero physique. 

“These heroes are pretty much replacing actors and musicians as people’s main source of celebrity fascination. People want to emulate them.”

“You don’t think a better way to emulate them would be to volunteer for charity or to simply be more kind?”

Rhett looked at her like she was simple. “Sure. But sometimes self betterment starts with your body. If your body is fit then your mind will be too.”

She didn’t agree with that. 

“A normal human could pour in thousands of hours in working out but they’d never achieve what Superman has.”

Rhett wasn’t deterred. “They can achieve the look. Sure it’ll require constant work, we’re not all blessed with the meta gene or are aliens, but feeling good about the way you look can do a lot for your self esteem.”

Or trying to achieve an impossible look would erode their self esteem and cause massive body image issues.

“Look at yourself!” Rhett exclaimed. He waved his hand around her. “You clearly hit the gym pretty regular. Fitness of your level takes work but you prove that it’s an achievable goal.”

“I guess.” All she did was stand in the sun. 

“Kara?”

She turned towards the crew. The lights were set up, a space cleared, and Paul, the photographer, was waving her over. 

“Yeah?”

“We’re good to start whenever you are.”

She smiled at Rhett. “Ready to put me through the ringer?”

“Absolutely!”

Last night Kara had talked extensively with Alex about her own workout routine and if asked the she would say she did exactly what Alex did but with a few extra weights thrown in. She worked out what would be a reasonable amount of weight for a woman of her supposed fitness level to be able to lift and how many reps she could do. She’d watched a couple of YouTube tutorials and practiced bicep curls with her Flash coffee mug in one hand and her World’s 1# Reporter in the other. 

She posed with a couple of the lighter weights and made exaggerated expressions of determination while Paul chuckled from behind his camera and clicked away. Then Rhett talked her through like he would if he were her personal trainer; she had a go on the machines, did lunges, hefted and stretched, and generally did what should have worked up a healthy sweat if she were human and capable of sweating. Truthfully Kara only really needed to pose, she could cut as many corners as she liked, but for authenticity’s sake she had decided to do the full work out and had told Rhett to show her no mercy. Something that he seemed all too eager to do. It was actually a heck of a lot more fun than she’d been expecting.

“Wow. Miss Luthor said you could handle it and she sure wasn’t kidding.” Rhett whistled, clearly impressed by her after she had finished her set on the leg press.

“She only works out like this because she’s addicted to doughnuts,” Paul said, he had never stopped taking pictures throughout this whole ordeal. Kara turned a mock disapproving gaze at him. He winked back and took a picture of her exaggerated frown-pout combo. He straightened up, his gaze slipping past Kara. “Funs over, the boss is here.”

“What?” Kara turned around and sure enough there was Andrea heading through the doors, held dutifully open for her by one of the gyms employees, in a figure hugging dress that probably cost more than six months of Kara’s rent. Worse was who walked in behind Andrea. Kara felt the wind get squeezed from her lungs. Lena stayed close to Andrea lips moving as she chatted away. Her hair was pulled back and held in a clip, showing off her neck and jaw line. She was dressed casually, boots with what counted as a low heel for her, black jeans and top, the neckline of which swooped low enough to show collarbones, sternum and a hint of cleavage. Despite the summer heat she also wore a red jacket with the collar popped.

“What are they doing here?” Kara muttered.

“Miss Luthor?” Rhett squeaked. “I uh… Should I go over?”

“We’re nearly done, right?” She asked.

“Yeah? You said you wanted some shots of you on the bench?”

At Paul’s nod Kara turned back to Rhett. “Let's get through that and then if you like I’ll introduce you to Lena.”

“Right.” He led her over to bench and with the help of another gym employee started loading up the bar. “You look like you can handle more but we’ll start with 75lbs. Do you know Miss Luthor?”

“I’ve interviewed her a couple of times.” Kara tossed her towel aside and shuffled up the bench, taking position. Some of the videos she’d watched last night covered the bench and was pretty confident she could convincingly pull this off. It would be just like when she used to go to spin class with Lena. A lot of huffing and puffing and no houses being blown down.

Rhett stood by her head, spotting for her, and gave her a quick explanation of what she was doing and what muscles she was working on. “Normally for women we don’t put the bench in for this particular routine. Men focus more on adding mass, women tend to focus on toning. Not that that’s really a thing. You’re either adding weight or losing it but no one wants to hear that.”

Kara filed that bit of information away for follow up questions, but kept most of her focus on lifting the bar cleanly and evenly, making it look like she was feeling the burn. But her mind kept wandering. She looked from the corner of her eyes to where Lena and Andrea were stood watching her. Why was Lena here? She knew why Andrea was here and it made anger curl tight and hot in her belly. She was checking up on her, making sure she was doing her job properly, as if Kara was some unprofessional idiot who would slack off. She flung the bar up, elbows snapping taught. Rhett yelped.

“Sorry!” She said immediately. She racked the bar and flexed out her fingers.

“That’s okay. Wow, wasn’t expecting that. You’re stronger than you look. Tell you what, we’ll add more weight. I’m kinda curious to see how much you can bench”

Kara gave him a sheepish smile and he started re-explaining the work out and highlighted some areas of how people could hurt themselves by not following the proper form while he and his assistant added more weight. 

“Jesus Danvers,” Paul muttered, the camera clicking as he took more photos. “You’re gonna pull something.”

Rhett tapped the side of the bench. “90lbs. You get in trouble you give me a shout.”

Kara saluted him and took hold of the bar again. Rhett talked her through a few reps and then decided to add another ten pounds. He let out a long, low impressed whistle as she started on her reps, taking them that bit slower and huffing out her breath in a fairly convincing impression of someone straining, if she said so herself. 

She lost herself in the repetition of it, her focus slipping elsewhere. She shouldn’t… she _shouldn’t!_ But she was only… well, not human, but curiosity wasn’t inherently a human trait.

“… says she doesn’t go to the gym. Can you believe that?” Andrea snorted. “Look at those guns she’s packing? You don’t get biceps like that typing 80 words a minute.”

“You spend a lot of time checking out your employee’s arms?” Lena asked her tone as dry as Death Valley.

“She always wears dresses that have them out. If it wasn’t hot as hell I’d introduce an office policy mandating all employees wear long sleeves.”

 _What?_ Kara couldn’t breathe. _Whatwhatwhatwhat?_

Andrea had been checking her out? What in the name of Rao was she supposed to do with _that_ information? If Kara wasn’t currently pretending to heft a significant amount of weight she’d have taken a moment to flail.

“She reminds me of - _oh_ what was her name?” Andrea sighed in annoyance. “Played on the Lacrosse team. She was probably about six foot and had shoulders like a lumber jack.”

“Kristen Ensley Harcourt?”

Andrea snapped her fingers. “That was her! I wasted so many afternoons watching Lacrosse for her. Whatever happened to her?”

“She represented the US at the Olympics then retired and married a senator’s son.”

“What a waste.”

“Try to contain yourself. You’ve got enough going on without a sexual harassment claim being made against you.”

“ _Please!_ As if I’d ever even think about trying. She’s nice to look at, sure, but far too self-righteous and prissy. I’d get a lecture from her every time I opened my mouth.”

“I am not prissy,” Kara hissed.

“What?” Rhett said.

“What?” Kara repeated back at him. “I, uh, said I’m not a...” she trailed off lamely, her face heating up. She couldn’t possibly finish that sentence. “We nearly done here?”

“I think that’s probably it. You have any more questions?”  
“Not right now, I’ll call you tomorrow with some follow up questions.” Rhett handed her a towel for her nonexistent sweat.

“I feel like your usual work out is probably a lot more intense than this. But you need to work on your form, there were a couple of times there where I was worried you’d hurt yourself.”

Kara laughed nervously. “I’m going to go talk to Ms. Rojas, would you like for me to introduce you to Lena?”

Rhett’s eyes lit up. “That’d be great!”

“You got what you need, Paul?” she asked as she walked past him. He gave her a thumbs up, his attention only briefly diverting from his laptop screen where he already had shots of Kara working out displayed to glance at Rhett. 

Andrea turned towards Kara, and for a woman who less than two minutes ago had been ogling Kara, her expression was nothing short of unimpressed. 

“Kara, you keep your glasses on when working out?”

Kara touched her frames lightly. “I need to be able to see.”

“Get contacts.”

“They irritate my eyes,” Kara lied smoothly.

Andrea raised both eyebrows. “Get over it. Take the glasses off and do the shoot again.”

Kara’s eyes widened in alarm. Bad enough that she was going to have her picture plastered over the inside of the magazine, her being pictured without her glasses would be a disaster. Panic bubbled in her stomach as she stuttered to find an excuse for why she couldn’t do that.

“I think the glasses work,” Lena said. Kara’s attention snapped towards her, as did Andrea who graced her with a look like she’d grown an extra head. “If you wanted it to look like the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue then you would have hired a fitness model. Or even had one of the trainers here at the gym be the focus. This gentleman here,” she indicated towards Rhett, “has muscles to spare.”

Rhett straightened up seemingly growing a whole five inches at Lena’s compliment.

Andrea didn’t look convinced. She eyed Rhett with her signature unimpressed stare. To Rhett’s credit he didn’t wither under it; the opposite, he puffed his chest up as if his muscles would protect him from Andrea’s disdain, like she couldn’t just pop him with a sharp word and watch unfeeling as he deflated like an over-inflated parade balloon. Withering stares were something Andrea and Ca Grant had in common. 

“You wanted Kara to do this to make it more personal, right?” Lena continued. “To have it seem approachable and to make it seem less daunting to the average reader? Kara in her glasses with her hair like this-”

“What’s wrong with my hair?” Suddenly paranoid Kara reached up to her hair.

“- it’s very nerd chic. She looks like a writer, someone who sits behind a desk, and that is exactly what you’re going for. You should keep the glasses.” Lena cocked her head thoughtfully. “You should do a follow up piece where you have some of the other writers do the same workout. Make it a group session. Post it on the website with the angle being about how much fun they had. You were saying how you wanted to focus more on the digital side and this could be just the piece. This will appeal to a younger demographic. Miss Nal would be the perfect candidate to headline the piece.”

“Uh-huh, and I’m sure FlexLex will be more than happy to host this little soiree.” Andrea crossed her arms and turned to Lena with a smirk, her hip cocked to the side. “You’re so transparent. Pitching it like you’re doing me a favour. I see through you, I see your eyes lighting up with the marketing possibilities.”

“Well.” Lena turned towards Andrea with a smug self-serving smile. “This way we help each other.”

“I’ll consider it.” Kara heard the rhythmic buzz of Andrea’s phone in her bag. Andrea swore and picked it up and swore again. “That’s my lawyer. I have to go.” She turned to Lena and air kissed her cheek before hurrying off, throwing a quick apology to Lena and a promise to do lunch later in the week. Lena’s gaze followed after her.

She offered no goodbye to Kara or the rest of the CatCo team. Not that Kara had expected her to. She really missed having James and Lena as he bosses. She hung her towel around her neck and gripped the ends.

“Enjoy yourself?” Lena asked turning her attention to Kara.

“It could have been worse,” Kara replied. She clapped a hand on Rhett’s shoulder and gave him a gentle nudge into Lena’s field of vision. “Lena, this is Rhett Novak, the entire reason this whole thing wasn’t a disaster.”

“It’s an honour to meet you Miss Luthor.” Rhett held out his hand, stars positively shining in his eyes. He looked like he might pass out when Lena took his proffered hand and shook it. Kara couldn’t help but notice that he didn’t give Lena’s hand the same competitive squeeze he’d given her.

“You’ll be who my assistant spoke to,” Lena said. 

“Yes ma’am.” He nodded seriously at her and his countenance took on a grave expression. He shuffled his feet and put his hands behind his back, looking like a soldier at ease, and Kara wondered if he was ex-military, “I, uh, just wanted to say that I’m sorry for what happened to Mr. Luthor. He was a great man and we all miss him.”

Lena froze. She exhaled heavily through parted lips, her eyes wide and fixed on Rhett. Kara pulled on her towel hard enough she risked tearing it in two around her neck. She wanted to kick herself. She wanted to stuff the towel in Rhett’s mouth to stop him from speaking. But she was as frozen to the spot as Lena was.

“I know that our grief can’t compare to yours, but I just wanted to say that we’re all here with you,” Rhett continued earnestly. “He saved us all. I don’t think there’ll ever be another man like Lex Luthor.”

A shiver ran through Lena followed by a small shaky laugh. “That’s true. Lex was…” She looked over Rhett’s shoulder, her jaw working like she was chewing on her words. Her eyes had a glassy look, like she was watching something far away that only she could see, and Kara found that she was holding her breath, waiting to see what Lena would do. “He was unique and he definitely left a hole in all our lives.”

Rhett smiled at her sympathetically. Kara could hear Lena’s molars grinding even as her face had assumed a mask of professional indifference. 

“You’ll have to excuse me I’m already behind schedule today. It was nice to meet you Mr. Novak.” Lena turned to Kara, her smile pinched. “Kara.”

“Lena,” Kara said, and it came out a breathless whisper. Lena had turned and was already marching away leaving Kara speaking to her retreating back. Kara half raised her hand, her fingers twitching, even though Lena was already out of reach and nearly through the door. She dropped her hand and turned back to Rhett giving him an apologetic smile and shrug combo. “She’s a busy woman.”

“Oh, hey, no need to apologise. I’d heard from others that she’s not as chatty as Mr. Luthor was and given what happened I wasn’t expecting much in the way of conversation.” His smile grew into a grin and he tossed his head back, sun kissed hair bouncing. “I’m just happy that I got introduced to her. Maybe would’a liked a selfie. If only to rub it in my little sister’s face. She’s a big fan.”

“Yeah?” Kara was only half-listening. She looked past him to the doorway that Lena had disappeared through. She should go after her. Was it even her place to go after her anymore? But she should go make sure she was okay. She twisted the towel in her hands unsure what to do.

“Sure, she’s the reasons he wants to study bio-engineering or some science ting I don’t understand. Only one she likes more is that superhero, uh, what’s her name?” He grunted in frustration and pressed his knuckles to his forehead, muttering under his breath. He snapped his fingers. “Dreamer! She’s got her poster up on her wall.”

“That’s great!” Kara’s head snapped back towards him, genuinely beaming. She couldn’t wait to tell Nia. But that would have to wait. “I’m sorry to have to cut this short but I’ve got to get a start on this article.”

“Hey, uh, before you go.” He stepped closer to her and lowered his head and voice. “Is Paul single?”

The corners of Kara’s mouth twitched and she had to stifle a surprised giggle. “I can’t say for certain but I think he is.”

“Awesome.”

Rhett offered her a fist bump which Kara giddily returned. She looked back over her shoulder just as she was slipping through the double doors to see Rhett standing talking to a very flustered looking Paul. 

Kara quick stepped through the gym and up the stairs to the foyer. Lena was hovering back from the entrance, apprehension etched on her face. There was a crowd of photographers already gathered outside the gym, easily seen through the glass doors, waiting for Lena. Kara slowed her walk and approached her carefully not wanting to startle her.

“Lena?”

For all of her care Lena still jumped. She looked over at her, her eyes wide at first but narrowing as she realised it was Kara, her brows drawing down into a deep almost suspicious frown. “Kara. Everything all right?”

“That’s what I was about to ask you,” Kara said. She stepped up close to Lena and loosely crossed her arms, nervously rocking back on her heels. “I’m sorry. If I’d known he was going to mention Lex I wouldn’t have introduced him.”

Lena huffed and turned her head. “Everyone I speak to wants to offer me their condolences on Lex. I still haven’t figured out what I’m supposed to do with them.” 

Kara didn’t have an answer for her. She readjusted her glasses and avoided Lena’s gaze. Her stomach churned uncomfortably, a mixture of hunger and guilt and so many other feelings that she didn’t want to examine too closely. It wasn’t fair. She shouldn’t have been feeling guilty about Lex; it wasn’t her fault that he was once again dead and all the harm that he had done to Lena. Again. So much of that rested on Lena’s own shoulders. 

_Not my responsibility_ , she silently chanted. _Not my responsibility_. It absolutely felt like it was her responsibility. 

“I was about to call my driver to come get me,” Lena said and she cast a wary look back towards the doors and the waiting vultures. “Think I’m going to need to call security as well.”

Kara bounced her leg. She had checked on Lena, she wasn’t about to have a break down, so she should clearly leave her to get on with her day. She probably had work to get back to and had a whole team of people to get her back to that work. It was not Kara’s place to swoop in and rescue Lena from every little inconvenience life threw at her. But there was something about the stiffness of Lena’s shoulders and the drawn pale expression on her face that made it so Kara couldn’t bring herself to leave her. She pushed her glasses back up her nose. “Let me change out of my workout gear and I’ll get you out of here.”

Stupid mouth!

Lena looked at her sharply. “No, Kara, it’s alright.”

“Seriously. We’ll go out the back and I’ll super speed us away. We could grab a coffee. I mean -” She cut herself off and coughed into her hand. Her mouth and her brain were just not connected at the moment. But the offer was out there now, both feet firmly in whatever she was doing here. “We haven’t done that in… a while.” Over a year. “And if you’re free then maybe we could do … that.” 

“Kara.” Lena twisted her fingers together. “Okay,” she said quietly.  
“Okay.” Kara stepped back. “I will go and get changed and then we will go. Go get coffee.” She sounded like a robot. Like she had no idea how to speak like a normal person. Talking to Lena had always come easily to her, it was one of the many things that had made being friends with her so easy. Everything had just flowed so smoothly, natural, like they were meant to be friends. Now it felt like there were all these hidden traps and sudden new rules that no one had explained to her and she had no idea how to navigate. She skipped back a couple more steps, still looking at Lena like the big weirdo that she was. “See you in a jiff!” She spun on her heel and marched away, head down and shoulders up.

/\/\/\/\

They slipped out the back just as Kara had suggested and, true to her word, she super sped them away. They didn’t go far, they were next to NCU and the area was flush with coffee shops. Kara’s first thought had been to whisk Lena away to Noonan’s, to go somewhere familiar, but as soon as she had her arm wrapped around Lena and had pulled her close to her she had changed her mind. She didn’t want to think about the fact that this was the closest she’d been to Lena in over a year. Didn’t want to think about the feel of Lena pressed to her side and how easily her arm fit around her.

Hugs were Kara’s bread and butter; and hugs with Lena had always felt like she’d got a hefty smothering of jelly with that bread and butter. She wasn’t sure when the last genuine hug with Lena had been. She had missed this. Missed their closeness and the way that Lena had allowed her into her space. So she couldn’t stand to take her as far as Noonan’s and, instead, just went far enough to avoid the photographers waiting for her. 

Even on this new Earth NCU wasn’t unfamiliar to her; it was her own university and very little from the outside looked to have changed from her college days, but she was painfully aware of how old she and Lena looked compared to the students milling about. They wound up in a small pretentious looking artisanal tea shop that had Kara wrinkling her nose when they entered. The mingling smell of loose leafed tea along with more than one over worked, under rested, sweaty student filtered through the air, and beneath that there was the smell of disinfectant.

The decor was cheap badly painted wood hidden by low gloomy lighting. A hipster sat by the window, spinning his spoon in his fingers as he stared unblinking at his Lord notebook. Behind the counter the server, a girl with a shock of pink hair, perked up at their entrance. Her mouth spread into a wide grin and her eyes lit up with high beam intensity. 

Lena jolted to a stop just after entering and Kara had to slam on her brakes lest she walk into Lena’s back and bowl her over. She was standing entirely too close to Lena, almost looming over her. She could feel the heat of Lena’s body radiating off of her, and that meant that Lena could definitely feel the heat coming off of Kara; more than one person in her life had commented that Kara was like a furnace. The back of Lena’s head was so close to Kara’s face that her hair was nearly brushing Kara’s nose. Over the smell of the tea shop was Lena; of her body wash and the ridiculously expensive moisturiser she used, her shampoo, even the scent of her clothes and the products the dry cleaner used on them. And beneath that was Lena, just Lena. Of her morning coffee, the clinging smells of the city, sweat beneath that and even the strange sterile chemical smell of her lab. It flooded Kara’s olfactory senses making her suddenly light headed, like she’d just shot up to the lower atmosphere at Mach 7. She had the strangest, dumbest urge to press even closer to Lena, to turn her head so that her face was pressed to her hair, to feel how soft it would be on her skin. 

She cleared her throat and stepped around Lena, dipping her head to hide the heat crawling up her neck, and pointed across the room. “How about we grab a table and take a look over what they’ve got?” She suggested.

Lena, oblivious to Kara’s sudden blushing, nodded sharply and moved towards the back of the shop, her movements quick and jerky. Kara followed behind her, throwing a few sideways glances at the occupied tables. Hopefully no one was about to get their phone out and start taking pictures of them. Lena barely looked like she was holding it together and did not need that in the press. No doubt LuthorCorp had a whole PR team ready to spin whatever pictures might emerge of her; they would probably paint it as Lena mourning her brother and they would beg for understanding and privacy, but that wouldn’t lesson the damage done to Lena. 

Thankfully no one seemed interested in them. The other customers were clearly students, and their wide eyed bloodshot gazes were fixed on their books and screens.

Kara yanked the chair out from the table a little too hard and sat down heavily, the wood cracked alarmingly as her butt hit the seat. She paused for second, cringing, waiting for the chair to give way, but it held firm. Lena sat down with much more poise, but still with the robotic rigidness she had been carrying since the gym. She shrugged out of her jacket and let it hang over the back of her seat. The low round neck of her top drew Kara’s eyes to the hollows of her collarbones. There was the faintest sheen of sweat to her skin. The light caught it and Kara eyes traversed up from her collarbones to the long line of her neck, where Lena had her hand curled around the back of it, and Kara’s gaze travelled higher still to Lena’s eyes. Lena was looking right back at her. Kara’s face felt like it was on fire.

She snatched the menu out of the rack and buried her face in it. She gasped in delight. “All you can eat scrambled eggs!”

“Please don’t attempt to eat your body weight in eggs.”

Kara scoffed, offended. “There will be no attempt about it I’m gonna do it. Need to restore my energy after that work out.” She rolled her lips back into her mouth and sucked on them as she considered the other options. 

Lena plucked the other menu from the rack and briefly scanned it. She placed it down on the table and pushed it away with her finger tips. Kara raised her eyes from her own menu, still not daring to meet Lena’s gaze, but watching the tension in Lena’s arm, the faintest tremble in her fingertips.

“What you gonna have?” She put her own menu down and looked up. Lena was gazing across the room the room, her eyes distant. Kara touched her glasses on reflex, checking they were still there, adjusting them. Slowly Lena turned back towards Kara. 

“I’m not hungry. I’ll just have a tea.”

“You should eat. It’ll do you good, make you feel better, and I bet you haven’t had anything since breakfast.”

Guilt flashed across Lena’s face.

“I bet you haven’t even had breakfast,” Kara amended. “Lena!” She tilted her head back and wailed her name in admonishment at the ceiling. It almost felt like it used to before it had all fallen apart. Before Kara had messed up and broken it and then Lena had taken a hammer to the parts of their relationship and smashed it into as many pieces as she could. Almost. 

Kara dropped her head and looked across the table at Lena. Before, when things were good between them, Lena would have been fondly exasperated at Kara’s fussing and teasing; she would have pretended to be offended and pretended to begrudgingly order something. She would have ordered something she knew Kara liked and too much of it so that Kara could steal from her plate. But Lena looked like Kara had just accused her of kicking an entire litter of puppies. Her shoulders sunk and her head hung low; she looked utterly miserable, and Kara had to clack her jaw shut on an apology. 

It was a reminder that things between them weren’t right. And a kick to the stomach that things between them might never be again. They couldn’t just gently tease each other like they used to. Kara was at a loss for what to say next. She pressed her tongue to the back of her teeth and felt her throat tighten. The air between them so thick with tension that they’d need something greater than a knife to cut it. 

“You guys ready to order?”

Kara startled. She’d been so focused on Lena that she hadn’t even noticed the waitress approach. “Yes. Yes?” Kara looked to Lena then back to the waitress who popped her gum and followed it up with an encouraging smile. “Yes!”

“Then what can I get you?” She whipped out a pad and clicked her pen smartly off of it. 

Kara grabbed the menu and pointed to it, turning her full attention to the waitress. “When you say all you can eat eggs do you really mean it?”

“We sure do!” She grinned, and then faltered. “Although we mean a human amount of all-you-can-eat.” She blinked; her nictitating membrane sliding across her eyes. 

“Gotcha!” Kara smiled warmly at her.

Lena ordered some food settling for a sandwich as well as a pot of Handsome Earl Grey; Kara grabbed some of the cookie & cream tea and the ‘Fully Loaded’ scrambled eggs and bacon on sour dough, telling them to pile as much eggs as they were able to on the plate.

“What makes this Earl Grey handsome?” Kara asked as two steaming tea pots were deposited on the table.

“The price I imagine,” Lena replied as though she couldn’t have bought the shop with spare change she found under her couch cushions. She lifted the lid on her pot of tea and peered into it, raising one perfectly sculpted eyebrow. 

“There're cornflower petals in it,” The waitress informed them both. “Gives it a pop of colour and a little extra kick of flavour. We like to think of him as Mister Earl Grey’s better looking multiverse twin.” She tucked her tray underneath her arm and gave them a final nod and smile, and bounced back to the counter.

Kara rubbed her fingertips across the surface of the table; it had a slightly tacky feel to it from the disinfectant sprays. She peered over at Lena and watched as she set the lid back on the tea pot and pushed it away. She folded her hands together and put them on the table top.

“When do you have to be back at the office?” She asked, her fingers twisting together. 

“I don’t. Not today at least but I’m probably going to call in just to check on Nia.” Kara removed the lid off of her own pot and inhaled the sweet aroma. To her surprise it actually did smell like cookies and cream. She picked up a spoon and gave the bits in the pot a poke with it, better to get the full flavour. “Thank you by the way for helping me with Andrea. I was starting to think I was going to have to fake an injury.”

“Anytime.” Lena dipped her head, smiling softly. 

Kara found herself smiling back. She lifted the still hot spoon from the pot of tea and pressed it to her lips. “What about you? Do you have to be back at work?”

“I don’t technically have a job so no.”

“What?” Kara dropped the spoon and it clattered off the table. She slapped her hand over it quickly to stop it bouncing to the floor. “What do you mean you don’t have a job? Who’s running LuthorCorp?”

“The board of directors I imagine.”

“But you’re on the board,” Kara spluttered.

“No, I was never on the board on this Earth.”

That brought Kara up short. She hadn’t thought what Lena’s position in this new Earth was. Lex had been LuthorCorp CEO and she had just assumed that with his death Lena would assume control of the company much like she had on Earth-38 when he had been sentenced to prison. But evidently not. 

“Oh. What is your position at LuthorCorp?”

“Technically I’m in R&D although I appear to functionally be a department unto myself. I have a ludicrously large budget and all that I have to do is produce at least one feasible idea a year that will be passed onto a team to develop and in return I can work on whatever other projects I like.”

“Wow. Really?”

“Really. I’m contracted to represent the company at events and I own shares, but other than that I have little obligations to the company.” She paused and tilted her head thoughtfully. “Certainly now that Lex is dead at any rate.”

“But you’re going to, right?”

“Going to what?”

“Take over LuthorCorp.” Kara leaned back as the waitress reappeared with their food and deposited it on the table. “Get back on the board and become CEO.”

“You’re not listening, Kara, there is no ‘get back on’ here. I was never on the board. I was never in a real position of power or influence in LuthorCorp, it was all Lex and - _that is a lot of eggs._ ” 

Kara beamed at the veritable egg mountain on the plate in front of her. Lena was staring at it with wide, almost horrified, eyes, her mouth moving soundlessly as she tried to take it in. It was truly impressive just how much scrambled egg they had managed to get onto the late, more impressive still that the waitress hadn’t spilt any. 

“Enjoy!” The waitress flashed jazz hands over their plates and skipped away.

Kara grabbed her fork and prepared to get stuck in. There was bacon and sourdough under there somewhere and she was going to find it.

“Okay but you’re not going to leave it in the hands of the board?” Or - worse - her mother. “Right?” She shovelled the first fork load of eggs into her mouth and followed it up immediately with the second without even pausing to chew. Lillian had slipped through their grasp but they were keeping tabs on her, waiting for her next move.

“I don’t see why I wouldn’t. LuthorCorp here is in a very different position to what it was…” Lena gestured vaguely. “…before. I had to wrestle that company from the ground up. Make it into something completely different. That’s not needed on this earth.”

“What happened to wanting to make a difference?” Kara asked around a mouthful of eggs. “To helping people?”

Lena barked a laugh. “Kara, we both know that the world is better off without my attempts to fix it. The past few years have more than proved that.”

Kara slowly chewed her eggs and swallowed. This was the part where she told Lena not to be ridiculous, that she’d done so much good in the world and had the potential to do so much more. But the words weren’t there. Once she hadn’t even needed to think, the defence and encouragement would have been automatic. Now her throat felt tight, the words distant and something she would have to scrabble for and she knew that if she did speak them then it would sound like a lie. 

Trust was a fragile thing. This time last year she had always trusted that Lena would do the right thing, that she would always, _always_ , be better than her family. Now she wasn’t so sure. She’d always known that Lena had a darker side, something roughly carved by her family, but it was only recently that she’d been on the receiving end of it. 

She turned the fork slowly in her fingers not able to meet Lena’s eyes. She was taking too long to reply, to say something - _anything!_ But she couldn’t speak past the way her heart was sinking.

Lena poured herself some tea, the drabs catching in the strainer. She set it aside and picked up the cup and Kara didn’t need to raise her eyes far to see the grimly satisfied smile that twisted Lena’s lips. Lena sipped her tea and set the cup back down gently on the table.

“At any rate I’ve found myself with a lot of free time on my hands. If you need anything and,” she sucked in a breath, “I realise that the last time we worked together it was exceptional circumstances, but if you need my help or for me to build something, a new suit or anything really, then I’ll be there. You just have to ask.”

“Thank you,” Kara said quietly. She stared forlornly at the pile of eggs no longer feeling hungry. Her phone went off, _Backstreet’s Back_ blaring and startling the sleep deprived students from their screens. Kara flushed and pulled her phone out from her pocket. “Sorry,” she muttered as she glanced down at the screen. “It’s Brainy.” She flicked her thumb across the screen and put the phone to her ear. “Hey Brainy.” She poked at the pile of eggs growing steadily colder. Lena picked up her tea and turned away, sipping it.

“Kara,” Brainy replied. “We’ve had another incident.”

“I’m on my way.” Kara dropped her fork and stood up, hanging up on Brainy.*

Lena looked up. “Trouble?”

“Uh…”

“You don’t have to give me any details. Go. I’ll take care of this.” She gestured to the table.

Kara nodded her thanks. She was about to leave when she pulled to a sudden stop, nearly tripping over her own feet. She turned and walked back to the table and looked to Lena, who peered back up at her questioningly.

“Are you okay?” Kara asked. The whole reason she’d suggested they get a drink was to make sure Lena was okay after Rhett.

“Of course.” Lena’s smile was tight. “Now go.”

Kara nodded and spun on her heel, marching out the door. Two incidents in such short space of time. It could be a coincidence but Kara had long ago stopped believing in them. Her business with Leviathan and Obsidian was far from over.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “How much of Crisis do you remember? "
> 
> “I remember dying.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Massive thank you to everyones who has been reading my rambles, especially those of you who clicked the kudos button and those who left a comment. You guys are awesome!
> 
> I know at this point there's not been much on the Kara/Lena front but I promise that we are getting there. Just painfully slowly... There will be lots of Kara Lena stuff next chapter with the added bonus of Dansen!
> 
> Warning for mild heterosexual activity. If you don't want to read that bit then skip the middle section starting: _“This is really impressive,”_ and hop back in at: _Saturday brought with it sunshine..._ Some stuff happens in there plotwise but I can either just tell you in the comments or put something in the note at the beginning of the next chapter.

Kara squinted at her reflection in the store window and her reflection, the image of an older professional looking woman who definitely hadn’t spent thirty-four minutes on her hair, gazed back. Her bangs were finally long enough that she could pin them back and she was taking full advantage of this. She had missed the sight of her forehead and not even the worried crinkle between her brows could take away from it. She tugged on her blazer and eyed her choice of outfit critically, already regretting the dress she was wearing. She’d been wearing a lot of pink lately and hadn’t thought anything of it until Nia had asked her if she was trying to channel Umbridge. Now that she looked at her reflection she had to admit she did have a certain conservative school teacher look to her. Strange how an outfit could look good in her apartment but the second she stepped outside her ensemble made her look less a fashion savvy investigative journalist and more a 47 year old Republican voter.

With a restrained sigh she turned her attention back to her phone and the conversation she was having with Kelly.

“You think it causes physical changes to the brain?” She asked. She stepped away from the store front and continued on her way. 

Kelly hummed thoughtfully. “I think we would benefit from looking at scans of those who used VR. When the lenses were in development we monitored brain activity during trials and saw obvious increased activity in the sensory cortex and the frontal lobe but I wasn’t part of the follow up trials.”

“So this information might already be out there?”

“Possibly. A lot of the information was destroyed by Gamemnae when we were battling Leviathan and whatever was left was seized by federal agents.” Kelly sighed. “Truthfully I’m not sure how much research was done into the lasting effects of VR exposure.”

“I can’t imagine much if any. It wasn’t as though Leviathan were planning on there being many survivors. Get Brainy to look into what the government seized.”

“He’s already on it.”

“Good. Listen I’m going to have to call you back I’m at my interview.”

“Good luck.” Kelly hung up.

Kara slipped her phone back in her bag and looked up at the sign outside the bar. It wasn’t the kind of place she would go, not the kind of place her friends would even consider going to. That little bit too fancy and pretentious, reeking of unnecessary expense, if it had been just a little bit more expensive then you’d probably need to be a member to enter. Somehow it also wasn’t quite _rich enough_ to be somewhere that Lena might go. 

Kara reached for the door but it opened before she could even touch it. She stepped through and stopped by the host, offering up a friendly smile. 

“Hi, I’m Kara Danvers, I’m meeting Mrs. Carolyn Davis, is she here?” 

His eyes flitted across the tablet. Kara took the opportunity to take in her surroundings. Definitely too expensive for her; she was already hoping that Mrs. Davis didn’t want to eat. There was hardly anyone here. A couple seated near the window. Three men hunched together in what looked to be an early business lunch. No families. Nothing about the place seemed friendly, it felt cold and impersonal. There kind of place that made her anxious in case she broke something. 

“This way Miss Danvers.” The host directed her towards one of the servers who, with a practised polite smile, led her across to the far side of the room. A woman was sat alone at a table not looking at them as they approached. 

“Mrs. Davis?” Kara approached the woman with the same care she would a startled animal. Carolyn Davis was seated at a table, her head down and shoulders up. She was middle-aged with a solid twelve years on Kara, her hair bottle blond with the roots just starting to show. Her head snapped up at the sound of Kara’s voice. She looked about ready to bolt. Kara smiled at her, gentle, gentle. “I’m Kara Danvers. We spoke on the phone.”

“Right. Yes.” Mrs. Davis stood and fixed her clothes, tugging on her blouse ineffectually, before holding out her hand. Kara took it and gave it a brief, firm, shake. Mrs. Davis’s hand was clammy with sweat and once she had released Kara’s hand she wiped it on her trousers, flushing. “Did you find the place alright? I don’t really know how this works. I’ve never talked to a reporter before.”

“I did, thank you. We’re just going to chat.” Kara took the seat opposite her, setting her bag down on the chair next herself, keeping her movements calm. Once she was settled she turned back towards Mrs. Davis and placed her hands palm down on the table top, her fingers spread. “No Pressure. Would you like a drink? It’s all on me.”

It really was on her. She wouldn’t be able to claim this back in expenses from Catco. Hopefully the drinks weren’t as over priced as the decor suggested.

Mrs. Davis eyed her already empty Martini glass almost guiltily. “Yes, thank you.”

Kara caught the attention of one of the servers. He sauntered over and politely took their orders, a club soda for Kara and another martini for Mrs. Davis. Kara didn’t comment on the fact that it was barely eleven in the morning, anything to get Mrs. Davis to relax. Perspiration was shining on Mrs. Davis forehead and top lip. She pulled on her fingers while they waited for the drinks to arrive, twisting round the thick gold wedding band she wore. Behind the wedding band sat a fat diamond that must have been her engagement ring. 

Kara pulled her digital recorder out of her bag and placed it carefully on the table, next she fished out her notebook and set that down too, and finally she set her phone to silent.

“You’re going to record this?” Mrs. Davis eyes widened.

“Only if you’re okay with that.”

“I thought this was going to be anonymous.”

“It is.” Kara sat up straighter and forced herself to look Mrs. Davis in the eye. Her mascara was on too thick and a clump of it had gathered in the corner of her right eye. “I promise you that the only person who will listen to this is me. Not even any of my colleagues will listen to this.” 

Mrs. Davis swallowed and nodded but she still eyed the recorder like it was a bomb that might go off at any moment. 

They waited in silence for the server to return with their drinks and Kara resisted the urge to fidget; Mrs. Davis still looked nervous enough to bolt and was doing enough fidgeting for the both of them. 

The server arrived back with their drinks and set them down and retrieved the empty glass; Kara smiled and thanked him. She sipped her club soda while Mrs. Davis knocked back a mouthful of her martini. Kara motioned to the server to bring them another one. 

Kara turned on the recorder and set it back down. “If you’re ready then we can get started.” At Mrs. Davis nod Kara settled back and opened her notebook and clicked her pen.

“I’m surprised you use pen and paper. I figured you’d have an Obsidian tablet given who you work for.”

“I’m a bit of a Luddite,” Kara told her with a quick grin. What passed for state of the art technology on Earth was child’s play on Krypton; the novelty of actually writing with pen and paper was so much more satisfying. Mrs. Davis thankfully didn’t question why Kara would be investigating her own boss. “When did you first start using Obsidian Platinum?”

“I was late to it. Most of my friends, the other moms in our group chat, were using it before I even thought to. It seemed like something for gamers or tech obsessed boys. My step-son, he’s sixteen, and he and his friends couldn’t get enough of it. It didn’t feel like it was something for people like me.”

“What changed you mind?”

“A friend.” She exhaled shakily, and then explained.

Her friends, mostly made up of the local PTA, designed their own suburb. A place where they could build their dream homes without the worry of finances or having to worry about the approval of their husbands. “No man-sheds or over stuffed garages,” she sniffed. They visited each other’s virtual homes, held garden and street parties. It was fun.

It sounded so mundane that Kara was starting to wonder if Kelly had given her the wrong name. She had read the police report but what Mrs. Davis described here was nothing like what Kurt Trammel had used the lenses for. Creating your ideal suburban life was hardly a crime. _Oh no, she thought she was back in VR and bought a new ficus. The horror!_ Maybe there was a whole other Carolyn Davis out there who had used the lenses to play scenarios where she burned down local orphanages?

“Did your husband know you were using the lenses?” Kara asked.

“He did. He thought it was cute.” She laughed bitterly. “Cute. You know he had his own pair of lenses? You know what he used them for?”

Kara shook her head.

“Sex. He was using them for sex.” She sniffed loudly, eyes welling up with tears. “I looked through his files to see what he was using them for. He became so obsessed. Straight in from work and into the den, lenses in. He’d sit there in his chair not moving. I thought he’d be playing sports. He played football back in high school but he injured his knee, always claimed that was the only reason he couldn’t play in college and go pro. But it was sex.” She fished the olive out of her empty glass and chucked it in her mouth, biting down harshly on it. Kara winced at the sound of it squashing between her teeth, the wet drag of the olive skin across enamel. “I could forgive it if he had been playing out some fantasy scenario with a celebrity, some musician or actress, or even a superhero, but no, _no!_ You know who he was having sex with?”

“I don’t,” Kara said weakly. She was still reeling from the information that people were using the lenses for sex. And that - _oh Rao!_ \- there was probably pornographic simulations of her out there. She felt dirty. Like she needed to excuse herself and go scrub every inch of her skin, use her heat vision to scour it. She might never feel clean again. There were probably people at Catco that had used the lenses for exactly that. She’d never be able to look Digital Media Ben in the eye.

“My sister!” Mrs. Davis hissed. She wiped furiously at her eyes smudging her mascara.

“That’s terrible,” Kara said heart sinking. It was a complete betrayal of the vows they’d made to each other. Kara wasn’t sure she believed that there were completely unforgivable actions; she’d always prided herself on being able to see and encourage the best in people and in her ability to empathise with and forgive, even if recent events had sorely tested her on that. But she understood that most other people had a line and that this was perhaps the line for Mrs. Davis and her marriage. She pushed down the urge to comfort her, she needed to remain focused. “Did you ever consider using the lenses for something similar?”

Mrs. Davis picked up the second Martini and downed it in one. She slammed the glass down on the table, the olive jumping out and bouncing off of the table onto the floor. Kara worried that she’d offended her but Mrs. Davis twisted her lips and cracked on. “Not for that no. But he did make me realise how I was wasting them. I could be anything with these lenses and there I was playing at housewife. So I did some research, looked at what other people were doing. I didn’t understand half of it. Space travel, riding dinosaurs, it all seemed pointless to me. My step-son, he and his friends were pretending to be superheroes. And that’s when it hit me. Why would you ever want to be a superhero? To take on all that responsibility? I have enough going on in my actual life. I have four children, ages from two to thirteen. Oh, and the step-son on top of that who never wants to stay at his actual mother’s.” She exhaled, long and shrill, like a kettle boiling over. “All he does is eat all our food and laze about. Refuses to do his school work and his chores. Torments my daughters. But if I suggest he gets a job or goes to his mother’s then I’m the bad guy. _I’m the villain!_ ” She jabbed her finger against her chest hard enough that Kara heard the hollow thumps. “So I thought I will be the villain. I’ll show them. I will be such a villain!”

This was starting to sound a little bit worse than getting a new ficus. 

It only got worse from there. Mrs. Davis described how she found a group on line who could hack Platinum and how she paid them to create a villain persona and a means for her to crash her step-son’s sessions. 

“They looked ridiculous in their knock-off Superman costumes,” she said viciously. “They weren’t a patch on the real thing, not a single one of them put up a fight. They were easy pickings. It became a game. Every time he refused to do his chores I hunted him down. Every time he spoke back at me. Every time he so much as spoke to my daughters. He never put it together. He never realised it was me. He’s never been half as smart as Jerry thinks he is.” 

Kara felt a little sick at the vicious glee in Mrs. Davis’s voice. She sipped her club soda before asking her next question. “Did you limit your activity to your step-son?”

Mrs. Davis shook her head. Kara wasn’t surprised. It hadn’t been her step-son who she had attacked that had led to her arrest.

Mrs. Davis continued, voice shaking as she explained how a disagreement between the friend group she had with the other mothers led to one of them being kicked out of their VR haven and how she’d suited up and taken to the VR suburb and destroyed it. 

“They deserved it,” she said with a careless shrug. She picked at her nails, not meeting Kara’s gaze. Whatever guilt she might have felt for her actions was buried beneath her own sense of satisfaction. “You heard about my arrest? I imagine it’s why you contacted me in the first place.”

“I did.” Her contacts at NCPD had given her a copy of her arrest report as well as transcripts of her interview. 

“I didn’t stop with the mom group. How could I with what my husband was doing? I couldn’t possibly leave it. My own sister. It was wrong.” She sucked in a sharp breath through her teeth. “I went into the simulation. I was disgusted by what they were doing, by what _he_ was letting her do. The first time I didn’t do anything, I just watched. I couldn’t move.” She wiped under her eyes. “Do you have siblings, Miss Danvers?”

“Just one.”

“Are you close?”

“Very.”

“I thought I was close with my sister. I thought we were friends.” She sobbed, tears falling freely. “I had thought at first that it was a simulation of my sister, that she was a victim of his pathetic fantasies. But she wasn’t. They were having an affair. Under my nose, in my home, in the room next to where I was cooking his damned dinner.”

“I’m so sorry.” 

“I attacked them, in the simulation, I forgot that the safety was turned off and they would feel everything. I want to say that it felt good but it didn’t. It wasn’t long after that the Unity Festival happened and Supergirl put a stop to it all. I destroyed my lenses, destroyed my husband’s and my step sons’. I didn’t tell them what I knew or what I had done. I told them that we would be doing family activities together instead. I didn’t tell my husband that I knew he was having an affair. I hoped that without the lenses he wouldn’t have the opportunity. He knows now of course.”

“I take it that it didn’t end?” Kara looked down at her notes. Mrs. Davis had attacked her sister at a family garden party in full view of all the guests. “When you attacked your sister had you just found out that the affair was continuing?”

“No. Yes.” She gave herself a shake. “I saw them together, just standing and talking over drinks and suddenly it was like I was back in the simulation. But not… I think Jerry thinks I had a flashback? But it felt like the simulation, it looked like the simulation. My husband went to talk to her. He was across the decking from me, and suddenly… Suddenly we weren’t in the garden any more. We were in that room, the room they had created for their filth. And they were dressed like they were. I was in my suit. I threw one of my bombs at them.”

A full bowl of potato salad according to the police report. 

“And then I attacked them - her - I attacked my sister.” She shook her head slowly and let out a wet, rueful, laugh. “I talked to Jerry about it but I don’t think he understands. How could he? I’m not sure I do. It’s funny, I never thought of myself as an angry person but it turns out I had a whole lotta anger in me. Anger like I didn’t think possible and those lenses they just opened me up and let it all out.”

Mrs. Davis wiped again at the tear tracks skimming down her cheeks. Her makeup was ruined, she would need to reapply it, but for now she forced a brittle smile and turned towards Kara. “Did you get what you wanted?”

“Thank you for taking the time to speak me,” Kara said. She turned off her digital recorder and closed her notebook. “How are you feeling?”

Mrs. Davis looked at Kara for a long time, eyes watery and the line of her mouth hard. Finally, her shoulders sagged and she looked away. “I have places to be Miss. Danvers. Will you inform me when the piece is published?”

“Of course.” Kara cleared up her things and stood up. She held out her hand but Mrs. Davis just ignored it clearly finished with the ordeal of the interview. “Thank you.”

/\/\/\

“This is really impressive,” William said. He had his back to Kara and was looking over the board she had set up in her apartment where she had pinned up all her information regarding Obsidian and her investigation into it. He sipped his beer and turned to face Kara, smiling that crooked smile that always looked a little too practised. “It’s going to be one hell of a piece. You know you won’t be able to publish it in Catco though, right?”

“I know.” She rolled her own bottle of beer between her palms. She didn’t even really like the taste of it; she only had some in the fridge for Alex and had only opened one for herself because William had accepted her offer and it seemed like the socially acceptable thing to do. 

“And that if you do manage to publish it Andrea will fire you?”

“I know that too.” Maybe if she flexed at Andrea she would be able to keep her job.

He sauntered over from the board to join her where she was perched on the edge of her couch. He placed his bottle on the coffee table and sat down; he turned towards her, gently knocking his knee purposefully into her. “I’m proud of you.”

She pressed her thumb nail to the bottle and dragged it down, shaving a thin sliver of glass away. She rolled the piece of glass into a small ball between her thumb and finger and flicked it away. He probably hadn’t meant for that to sound patronising. Had probably meant for it to be encouraging. But his words dug under her skin and she had to swallow down a retort with a mouthful of gross tasting beer. He gently plucked the beer from her hands and set it on the table next to his own, then touched the back of his fingers to her knee. He had moved closer to her. Close enough that she felt the gentle puff of air of his breath on her face, could smell the beer he had just been drinking and his coffees from earlier today.

“I think tonight went very well. Don’t you?”

It had, she couldn’t deny it. They had met up after work, grabbed something to eat, and then gone for a few drinks. As her dates with William had gone it was by far and away the least awkward. It was why after he had walked her home she had invited him up. Maybe, just maybe, she had finally worked through whatever it was that was stopping her from actually enjoying his company.

That was until they were back in her apartment and she was asking him if he wanted a drink, and pressing an opened bottle of beer into his hands. Then it had suddenly all come flooding back. The unease. The feeling like her own skin was foreign to her. She’d smiled through it, made small talk, and showed him her work so far on her investigation even as she’d felt like there was a hole widening in her chest. 

He was leaning in closer, his lips hovering mere inches away from her own. His breath was warm. She swallowed, knowing that she could put a stop to this now but also feeling like this is what should be happening and that she should want this, but silently wishing for an emergency that would require Supergirl’s attention, then feeling awful for wanting that and - 

He kissed her. His lips were soft, wet, his mouth open a little too wide so that he kissed around her lips rather than on them, but he adjusted quickly. It was motions after that. A long time since she’d been kissed properly, but she did what she was supposed to and ignored the creeping tension inching up her spine. He slid his hand up her thigh, leaning in closer. She leaned away, and rather than backing off he followed after her, his other hand pressing against her shoulder to gently push her back down on the couch. She froze and there wasn’t a force on earth that could have moved her. 

“Kara?” He hesitated. She felt him push against her shoulder, gentle but firm, trying again but she still didn’t budge an inch. His brows knitted together in confusion, and panic flared in her. A human woman would bend; she would be able to be pushed. She was all steel. She curled her hand around his neck and pulled him to her, pressed her mouth to his. He yelped in surprise the sound muffled against her lips as he fell forward on top of her, his full weight suddenly against her. If she had been human she would have been winded. 

He needed no more encouragement. His yelp morphed into a low sound of satisfaction as he pressed fully against her, his mouth eager and she tried to reciprocate. He had one hand on her waist and the other knocked against her head as he tried to slide his fingers through her hair. She felt stiff and wrong. Her head was crushed against the arm rest and one of her legs had fallen from the couch. All her muscles were tight with tension. Her hands hovered above his back, fingers flexing, unsure of where to put them. Slowly, she lowered them to his back, felt the softness of the fabric of his shirt bunch beneath her palms. She slid her hands to his sides, felt his ribs through his shirt and backed off. Tried again and once more felt the hardness of his muscle and the expansion of his ribs. His painfully human ribs that might as well have been made from paper-mache. 

She couldn’t do this.

“Wait. William.” She pulled her mouth away from his. Her glasses were knocked askew as she turned away. She pushed him up with one hand on his chest, fixed her glasses with the other.

“What is it?” He lifted himself up so that he was hovering over her. His eyes were wide and bright, his hair ruffled even though she didn’t remember touching it. “Are you okay? I didn’t hurt you did I?”

She made a strangled noise in her throat, a choked off near hysterical laugh. Hurt her? As if that was what she was worried about. 

“Yeah. Yeah, I am.”

“Oh good.” He smiled at her, leaned in and kissed the corner of her mouth, the edge of her jaw. He was careful, gentle. That hurt in a way she wasn’t sure she could describe. She felt suddenly terrible. Like she was a fraud. She gripped the throw on the couch too tight.

“Stop.”

His lips hovered just below her ear and he exhaled. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” 

“Kara?” He moved away from her, placing himself at the far end of the couch. She sat up as well, turned and put her feet on the ground. She leaned forward, holding the edge of the couch lie she was going to launch herself from it. “Did I do something wrong?” He asked. “I thought that you wanted this.”

“I- I did. I do. It’s just that I…” she searched for the words, for the explanation of why she couldn’t do this with him. _Too soon._ They’d been dating for a while now. _I’m concerned I might accidentally cave in your ribs._ Too honest. _I don’t want to._ It didn’t feel like enough. It felt weak, like an excuse. Worse because she couldn’t even think of a reason why she didn’t want to. She just didn’t.

His hand brushed her arm and she flinched back. “It’s against my religion!” she yelped.

“Oh? Oh!” He shrank back from her. “I am so, so sorry, Kara. I had no idea.”

How could he? She’d just made it up. Her face was burning, her stomach twisting into ice cold knots. Was it possible to die of shame? If it was then she should call Alex because she was surely on her way out.

He looked just as embarrassed, his face falling with contrition. 

“If I had known I would never have done that. I am so sorry.”

“It’s okay. I shouldn’t have let it get that far.”

He laughed and rubbed the back of his head. “No, you probably shouldn’t have.”

She flexed her fingers. Of all the stupid lies she could have come up with. “I would understand if this changed things for you.”

“I still like you. I still want this to continue if you’re still willing.” He smiled hopefully at her.

Why did she feel disappointed at that? She was a terrible person! The actual worst! It would have been easier if this had been a deal breaker, that not that she’d suddenly taken sex off the table and he was no longer interested in her. Now she was going to have to navigate this whole new complication. Why hadn’t she kept her mouth shut? It wasn’t as though she had anything against sex, she’d enjoyed it the few times she’d had it. And William was good looking; tall and buff, with a nice smile and thick hair, and all those other things that made him physically attractive. She should want to have sex with William. A normal sensible heterosexual leaning woman would want to have sex with him.

“I want that,” she said quietly, the words bitter on her tongue.

“Good.” He gently tapped his fist against her bicep. “I’m going to call it a night. I had a truly wonderful time.”

He stood up and Kara stood with him, followed him to the door, only dragging her feet a little, and opened it for him. He stepped out and turned back towards her, smile still fixed in place.

“Thank you for being so understanding,” she mumbled. 

“Of course. And before I forget.” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a crumpled leaflet. He handed it over to her. “This is for a support group for VR addicts. I think it might be worth looking into for your article.”

“Thank you.” She unfolded it and glanced over it. It didn’t look professionally made, more like something that someone had got their kid to knock up in ten minutes. “Digital Dependants,” she read aloud. There was a picture of a man holding his head in his hands on the front. “I’ll check it out.”

He hovered in her doorway, hands shoved in his pockets.

“Can I kiss you goodnight?” He shrugged his shoulders at her. “Is that allowed?”

“Yeah, that’s allowed.” It would be a bit weird if it wasn’t given that less than five minutes ago he’d had his tongue in her mouth. He pressed a chaste kiss to her lips, much more like the previous kisses they’d exchanged prior to this date. 

“Goodnight Kara.” 

He left and she closed the door before he disappeared around the corner to the stairwell. She leaned against the door and exhaled, long and slow. Of all the stupid… She squeezed her eyes closed. She’d deal with the fallout from her lie later. For now she had a leaflet to read and a support group to research.

/\/\/\/\

Saturday brought with it sunshine, the potential for ice cream, and of course an attack.

Kara hopped back, dodging the fireball that had been thrown her way. There wasn’t enough power behind it and it plopped on the ground between her and the newest wannabe supervillain where it smouldered out lamely, leaving a small charred patch on the grass. She looked up at Bradley Bashford who all of five seconds ago had been engulfed in flames but now just stood in the remnants of his clothes, his charred tighty-whities on display. His arm was still stretched out before him from his terrible throw. He was never going to make a pitcher.

“My costume!” He screeched looking down at himself. “That took me all weekend!”

“Your powers are fire based and you didn’t think to make your costume flame-retardant?” She was sure villains weren’t this dumb back on her old Earth. 

“Just you wait Supergirl!” He curled his fists and started straining, teeth clenched together. “ _Hhhhrrrrrhhuuurugh!_ ”

“Bradley, you haven’t actually done anything all that bad.” Yet. He’d just ruined everyone’s afternoon in the park but a little public disorder charge wasn’t going to ruin his life. There was still time to reason with him, to turn him back from whatever ill-thought out path he had decided to take. “So how about you stop trying to set yourself on fire and we talk about this?”

He continued grunting and straining. His face was turning purple and the veins on his forehead bulged. If he continued like this he was going to give himself an aneurysm. Or do something far more embarrassing.

“Bradley,” she tried again, taking careful steps towards him. The park had been full to the brim, joggers and dog walkers and families out enjoying the sun, but thankfully they had all scattered, a little too used to occurrences like this. They stood at the edges of the park, phones out and filming, but keeping a safe distance. One day she was going to have to talk to Kate or Barry about how they dealt with the public’s constant need to film everything.

“My name isn’t Bradley!” He screamed from between gritted teeth. “It’s Glowman!”

“Did you stay up all night thinking of that?” Probably not the best idea to provoke him. But really? Glowman? Kara was within six foot of him, tentatively reaching out. If she could just get her hands on him, just calm him down. She had no idea how his powers worked, he might just flicker and create embers, but she couldn’t risk him doing his best impression of Mount. Vesuvius. With her other hand she took hold of the edge of her cape. If she needed to she could throw it around him and contain any blast he might create.

“Shut up!” He hunkered down, pulling his elbows in tight. “Come on! Glow!”

To Kara’s amazement he actually did start to glow. Orange flickered beneath his skin and rippled up him, his veins looked as though liquid sunshine ran through them. Light burst from his eyes and mouth, and, just like that, flames once more engulfed him. He let out a triumphant whoop just in time for Kara to extinguish him with her freeze breath. He blinked in confusion, his mouth hanging open. From head to foot he was covered in ice crystals. She dropped her hand to his shoulder and he gazed up at her, shivering.

“Aw, man.” He sagged in defeat.

A quick call to Brainy had him contacting the relevant authorities and Bradley Bashford was led away in power dampening cuffs. As soon as he was in the van people started moving back into the park, kids bouncing at their parents’ heels, imitating their favourite superheroes. Kara waited while people took pictures, videoed her hovering a foot off the ground. She could hear a couple trying to work up the courage to ask her for a selfie. There was a tugging at her cape and Kara looked down to find the watery gaze of a little girl looking back up at her.

“Hey sweetie, what’s wrong?” Kara knelt down so she was eye level with her. The little girl had the biggest, out of control riotous curls Kara had ever seen, and they bounced delightfully with every small twitch of the girl’s head.

“Rachael, come back here.” A man, her father most likely, jogged up. “I’m so sorry Supergirl.”

“It’s alright. What can I help you with?”

“I let go of my balloon.” 

“It’s just a balloon,” her father said. He looked embarrassed. 

Kara looked up into the sky, squinting. “Does it have a dog on it?”

“Yeessss!”Rachael said, hissing the ‘s’ out her curls bouncing as she vibrated with excitement.

“I see it.” Kara stood up, flashed a quick smile at Rachael, and took off. The balloon wasn’t all that high up and was floating towards the city. Kara snagged the string and pulled the balloon close to her, careful not to pop it as she descended back to the park and where Rachael was bouncing on the spot. Kara landed softly in front of her and handed her the balloon. “One balloon safely retrieved.”

“You didn’t have to do that, Supergirl,” Rachael’s father said just as Rachael shrieked, “Thank you Supergirl!” and threw her arms around Kara.

Kara returned the hug. “Let you in on a secret? Saving balloons is my speciality.”

With a final squeeze, Rachael and her father left, Rachael skipping, the string of her balloon clutched tightly in her fist. 

Grinning, ribs pushing up with all the best, happiest warmest feelings, Kara floated up a couple of feet and looked around the park. Other than the charred patch of grass it didn’t look like anything had happened. Everyone was back; skaters, joggers, dog-walkers, and families strolling around the paths. A familiar face was at the edge of the park. Kara floated over.

“Ms. Luthor,” she greeted. Lena tilted her head up, eyes hidden behind mirrored sunglasses. Her lips twitched.

“Supergirl,” she said. “I see you’ve made a fan for life.”

“It’s traumatic losing your balloon.” She could see herself reflected in Lena’s lenses, the sun shining behind her, her bangs too long and in her eyes. 

“I wouldn’t know. Luthor’s don’t get balloons,” she said archly.

“Your family has several balloons in the Thanksgiving parade.”

The corners of Lena’s mouth twitched again like she was holding back a smile. “Now that would be traumatic losing one of those.”

Kara looked over the top of Lena towards a parked SUV with tinted windows. A man and woman stood outside it, both wearing suits and dark sunglasses, with ear pieces. Both with that rigid shouldered look of ex-military. A quick scan revealed that as she expected they were both armed. “Friends of yours?”

Lena cast a glance back over her shoulder. “Hardly friends.”

“Are you okay? Is there something I should know about?” Kara inched closer, dropping her voice.

“Just a meeting with my-” Lena cut herself off. Her lips twisted into a sneer. “With Lillian.”

That didn’t make Kara feel better. She frowned over at the guards.

“It’s alright, Supergirl. I’ll be fine.”

“You don’t have to deal with her on your own. If you need my help then all you have to do is ask.”

Lena’s smiled softly. “I know.”

“Actually, if you’ve got a spare couple of minutes then there’s something I’d like to talk to you about.”

“Oh?” Lena arched an eyebrow. “I’m in no hurry to go to this meeting.”

“You wanna play hooky? It’s perfect ice cream weather.”

“Give me a moment to lose Mr. and Mrs. Smith here and I’ll meet you by the pond.”

Kara grinned. “It was good to talk to you Ms. Luthor,” she said loud enough for the guards to hear. She flew straight up. Fast enough that Lena was forced to take a steadying step back. She flew high enough and fast enough and far enough that it looked like she was leaving the park, heading elsewhere. Once out of sight she circled back round, landed amongst some trees and deactivated her suit. Kara Danvers emerged, glasses on, hair pulled back in a messy ponytail, and dressed down in worn joggers and an old t-shirt. She made a beeline for the pond silently regretting what she was wearing. She was going to look like an impoverished art student stood next to Lena in her designer dress, but it was Saturday, and before she’d heard the commotion in the park she had been lazing about in her apartment. At least she’d thought to wear a bra.

True to her word Lena was waiting for her, gazing out over the water at the ducks lazily swimming in circles. Kara hurried over, her hands going up to check her hair and glasses. Lena turned just as she approached, her lips curling up into a smile. Her head dipped slightly, as though she was taking in Kara’s get up and dragged back up her.

“Hey,” Kara said, returning the smile, ignoring the sudden prickling of warmth beneath her skin. She should have flown home and changed. “How’ve you been?”

“The same. No changes on my end. You?”

“Good. I’m sorry I bailed on you last time.”

“No need to apologise. Duty called. It’s actually a relief to know why you left, at least now I don’t have to spend hours analysing our conversation to work out what it was I said that offended you.”

Kara looked up sharply at Lena. Lena’s mouth fell open as colour infused her cheeks. She quickly looked away.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean for that - that was - ” Her mouth snapped shut and she swallowed. “That was careless. I wasn’t trying to make you feel guilty. You had your reasons and I respect that.”

“It’s alright. Don’t worry about it.” Kara quickly assured her even as she felt like maybe the ground could swallow her up. She’d barely thought about how it must have looked to Lena her constantly skipping out on their brunches, cutting conversations short and just disappearing with a lame excuse. At worst she’d been worried that Lena would think her flaky and not want to be friends. That fear had always been assuaged when they’d next met up and rather than being annoyed she’d been pleased and, in those early days especially, thankful that Kara was there.

She stared at Lena, at the pink blooming in her cheeks, the grimace twisting her lips. She had turned back to face Kara but her eyes were still hidden behind her shades, just the tight pressed line of her mouth showing her discomfort. Kara rubbed the pads of her fingers against her palms. “You wanna go get-”

“You’ve got a little something - oh.” Lena had started to reach up towards Kara but she froze, her hand hovering in the air between them for a second before she dropped it. 

Kara’s fidgeting intensified. “I’ve got a little..?”

“May I?” Lena lifted her hand towards Kara once more and Kara nodded at her. Lena stepped forward right into Kara’s personal space and Kara couldn’t help the small gasp that escaped her lips. She looked over Lena’s shoulder, ignoring the way the ground suddenly felt unsteady beneath her feet, like she had her own personal mini-earthquake to contend with. She felt Lena’s hand brush against her head and then a gentle tugging. Lena stepped back holding up a twig with leaves attached.

Kara laughed, delighted. She plucked the twig from Lena’s hand. “I flew through the trees.”

“I can see that.” Lena returned her smile. “So. Ice cream?”

“Ice cream,” she agreed and tucked the twig safely in her back pocket.

They found a stand and Lena bought herself a small carton of pistachio and mint while Kara opted for two cones of double chocolate chip. She scarfed one down in record speed and kept the other to savour. Lena shook her head fondly as they ambled away from the stand, silently handing Kara her napkin and pointing to the corner of her own mouth. Kara wiped her mouth and wasn’t surprised to see the white of the paper stained with chocolate.

“Did I get it all?”

Lena tilted her head, brow furrowed as she scrutinised her for what felt like an age. Kara was just beginning to fidget, folding the paper towel over her fingers when Lena finally said, “you’re good.”

The paper towel tore over Kara’s knuckles and she hastily shoved it into her pocket. They started walking, slowly following one of the paths that wound through the park. “What does your mother want?”

“Lillian,” Lena corrected quietly. She poked at her ice cream with the plastic spoon. “That woman isn’t my mother.”

Kara frowned. That had sounded bitter, even for Lena. 

Lena caught the look on Kara’s face and gave a self-deprecating laugh. “I sound like an edgy teenager. I don’t mean that to disparage against adoption or step-parents. The woman who raised me died, this Lillian here is a stranger to me.”

“She’s still -”

“No she’s not.” They paused walking to allow a pair of joggers to get past them before starting up again. Kara dragged her feet a little, the slow pace making her antsy. But Lena was in heels, and while Kara knew she could power-walk in them, there was no need. Below the sounds of the park Kara could hear the rhythmic tap, tap, tap of Lena’s heels on the ground.

Lena held her small tub of untouched ice cream out in front of her, one arm folded across her stomach. “The Luthors here lived entirely different lives,” she said. “There might be some similarities, like that I’m still a product of Lionel’s affair, but almost everything else is different. Lex never turned the sun red, he never tortured James, he and Superman never fought. On this Earth he is very much a hero. Did you know that they’re putting a statue of him up at the waterfront? There used to be a statue of you there.” Lena turned her head away and made a noise of disgust. “It’s all lies of course. My family is still just as evil and twisted as it ever was, as I’m sure it is on every iteration of Earth, but they - we - hid it better here. Lillian is a world renowned doctor who is frequently on television talking about her heroic son. Lex somehow managed to win sexiest man of the year two years running.”

“That’s alarming.”

“Apparently there’s no accounting for taste on this earth.” She jabbed viciously at her ice cream. “My mother, the Lillian who raised me, or at least paid others to do it in her stead, died during the Crisis.”

Kara slowly licked her ice cream. They hadn’t discussed Crisis and the merging of the Earths. With everything that had happened with Leviathan, and with Lex and Lena, Kara hadn’t stopped to take the time to properly digest the Crisis and what had happened and what she had lived through. She was beginning to realise that there was a lot of things she hadn’t spared the time to think or talk about because of Lex and his machinations. She’d spent no time at all with Jon and now he was suddenly a teenager, in the blink of an eye she’d missed out on his entire childhood; she had lost Argo and her mother again; Kal had died. 

She’d lost Alex.

“How much of Crisis do you remember? J’onn restored Alex’s memories and she says she doesn’t remember much leading up to the actual events. Her memories cut off when she boarded the ships.” Which was a small mercy. 

“I remember dying.”

Kara’s breath caught in her throat. Lena was looking past Kara, across the park, her brow furrowed and her jaw tense. She swallowed.

“I remember being on the ship and seeing the anti-matter wave, and I… I remember knowing that there was nothing I could do to stop it. That I had tried my best to save those people and still failed.”

“You didn’t fail,” Kara said. “We didn’t. The Anti-Monitor was defeated and we’re all still here.”

“But we’re not all still here. How many Earths were destroyed? An incalculable number of lives were lost.” Lena stared at her ice cream like it was offending her, like it was somehow its fault that the Multiverse had been merged. “Everything is different. I feel as though I’m living in some distorted reality. Where on the surface it’s the same but the more I look at it, the more layers I peel back the more I see that’s different and wrong. I had to call Kelly to ask her if James and I had been in a relationship on this Earth. We weren’t, in case you were wondering. So I have all these memories of an entire relationship and none of it actually happened.” She exhaled heavily. “It’s a strange feeling to know someone so intimately but to be aware that they might not even know me at all.”

Kara didn’t at all want to think about Lena and James being intimate in any sense of the word. “J’onn gave him his memories back. If that helps. He does remember you.”

Lena exhaled again. “Not really my point, Kara.”

Kara opted to aggressively eat her ice cream. She’d just wanted to check in on Lena and ask her for a favour and somehow she’d wound up in a much heavier conversation than anticipated. One that she was completely unprepared for. And that really just described every interaction she had with Lena these days. “So what is the point?”

Lena stirred the contents of her untouched and melted ice cream, her brow furrowed behind her shades. She squared her shoulders and looked up at Kara. “I think when Lex made the deal with the monitor for me to keep my memories it killed the Lena of this earth.”

“Not what I was expecting.” Kara finished off her ice cream and wiped her hands on her joggers. “Surely it’s just the same as Alex and the others, where your memories were restored.”

There was an argument that the memories made the person. When J’onn had wiped away Alex’s memories of Kara being Supergirl it had changed her personality; she had been harder, more ruthless. Still her sister, but off enough that Kara had felt it under her skin like a splinter. But she didn’t want to think of it like that. It would mean that Alex, her Alex, had died. But J’onn had said that he had _restored_ her memories, not that he’d copied and pasted Alex’s memories over this entirely different Alex, effectively killing this Alex and kind of, but not really, resurrecting her Alex and - 

She was getting a headache. An actual genuine headache.

“The Lena of this Earth was a very different person,” Lena continued oblivious to Kara’s mini-freakout. “I’ve been going over her e-mails, notes she made, her scientific journals as well as whatever news articles or gossip made its way into the press. Even listening to stories from Andrea, she keeps telling me things that I have no recollection of ever happening. She was Lex’s number one cheerleader and from what I can tell just as awful as he was.”

“She and this Earth’s Supergirl were best friends. She couldn’t have been that bad.”

“You say that like I didn’t manipulate you for months, pretend to be your friend to get what I wanted. She easily could have been manipulating you for years.”

Or, given that Supergirl and the DEO were on the Luthor payroll, this Supergirl might have bought into everything the Luthor’s were selling. That she hadn’t been an unwitting pawn but a staunch supporter. She thought about the picture in the gym, the one of her lifting Lex in the air and how happy she looked. 

“She could have been,” Kara conceded. “But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that we’re here now and what we do going forward.”

Lena didn’t look convinced. Her shades weren’t enough to hide the heavy frown so was sporting. She sighed heavily. “I suppose your right. Sorry for getting morose on you. We should look forward and not dwell on things we can’t change.”

“Exactly!” 

Lena’s smile turned genuine. “The meeting with Lillian is with the lawyers to discuss Lex’s assets. They’ve been going over his will with a fine toothed comb and she’s trying to secure everything for herself.”

“So nothing nefarious?”

“It’s Lillian, she’s no doubt cooking something up.”

“Who gets his collection of classic cars? You gonna eat that?”

“They would be wasted on Lillian so me.” Lena handed over the tub of melted ice cream. It was liquid at this point so Kara just tipped it back and drank the contents. “I imagine I’ll keep a couple for myself and sell the others. Definitely keeping the Miura”

Kara had no idea what that was, cars meant nothing to her.

“You like the weirdest flavours,” she said, licking out the tub, making sure to get her tongue right into the corners.

Lena had gone a little pink. Humans burned in the sun so easily. “It’s not weird. Just because your pallet stretches to various kinds of fried batter.”

“I will not be spoken to like that by a woman who likes kale smoothies.”

“It’s a super food.”

“Lies made up by women on instagram,” Kara declared loudly, startling the ducks.

Lena shook her head fondly. “What is it you want to talk to me about?”

“I wanted to ask a favour.” Kara folded down the sides of the paper tub. “A Kara favour not a Supergirl favour. If that’s okay?”

Lena nodded.

“I’m investigating Obsidian, looking into the lasting effects of the VR lenses. There have been a few incidents where former users have started to believe that they were back in a simulation.”

“Does Andrea know about this?”

“My investigation? No. The incidents? She’s keeping quiet about it if she does.”

“Pretty ballsy to be investigating the woman who signs your pay checks.”

“When you ran Catco we investigated you. With your blessing as I recall.”

“Yes, but there was every chance that I was guilty of what Edge accused me of.”

“You don’t think Andrea carries a portion of guilt for what Leviathan did? What she developed with Obsidian?”

Lena blew out a breath. “She’s already going to pay for that. Leviathan isn’t around and there’s a federal investigation into Obsidian and Andrea’s involvement with Leviathan. It’s looking like the sole blame will fall squarely on her shoulders, which I expect was Leviathan’s plan all along. Someone would have to take the fall for what they did. She was used by Leviathan. I would have thought that you’d be sympathetic to that.” Lena cocked her head. “What angle are you going for? Once the trials start there’ll be no end to investigations into Andrea. Every inch of her life will be laid bare.”

“The human angle,” Kara said. Lena was starting to sound defensive. “I’m not looking to condemn Andrea. I want to look into how people who built a portion of their lives around these simulations are coping now. Did you know that there are support groups for VR addicts? I spent last night looking through he subreddit for VR addictions and reading peoples stories. There are so many that aren’t coping. Add to that this new thing where people are starting to believe that they’re back in the simulation and it’s not looking good. I want to speak for the people who risk being forgotten in this whole investigation.”

Lena crossed her arms and looked down at her feet. “What do you need me for?”

“Kelly has been helping me. She thinks that the VR simulations might have caused changes in brain patterns or waves or something. She thinks there’ll be a difference between someone who didn’t use VR, someone who used it but in moderation and those who really immersed themselves in it. We’d like to look further into this but without the DEO we don’t have the equipment.”

“You need my lab.”

“Please.”

“Of course.” Lena nodded. “But I want to be part of this. My lab, my equipment, and call me territorial but I’m not comfortable with having other people use my stuff.”

“That’s fair. Let me get in touch with Kelly and we can arrange a time to get to work.”

“Kara.” Lena slipped her glasses off and turned to Kara. “Just so that we’re clear. I’ll help you with this, but I won’t spy on Andrea for you. If I suspect she’s doing something that will hurt or endanger people then I’ll inform you. But I won’t betray her trust.”

“I would never ask you to do that?”

Lena’s jaw tightened. “Wouldn’t you?”

“No,” Kara insisted, rattled by Lena’s words. “Of course not.”

Lena narrowed her eyes, scrutinising Kara. What she was looking for Kara had no idea. Eventually Lena turned away, her throat bobbing as she swallowed. “I should get going. I’m already late and tardiness is something that Lillian abhors.” She slipped her glasses back on and flexed back her shoulders, prepping herself. “Call me later? We can go over what you need and I can organise lab access for you.”

“Sure.”

Lena hovered, waiting for something, still turned towards Kara. Kara scuffed the toes of her vans against the ground. This was getting awkward. She coughed into hand. 

“I’ll see you later?”

“Right.” Lena half-turned away. “Thank you, Kara.”

Kara watched as Lena walked back the way they had come. She waited until Lena was out of sight, and listened until she heard Lena greet her guards and driver, listened to their terse admonishments at Lena for disappearing as well as Lena’s insincere apology. Once the car door was shut, Kara spun on her heel and left the park. She pulled her phone out and contacted Kelly to let her know that Lena was on board.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lena’s lab didn’t hold the best memories for Kara. Oh, she understood that Lena had done incredible things here. Her research and inventions had saved countless lives, including Kara’s own. But something about it set Kara on edge. It worked under her skin, tight and uneasy, not unlike that first ripple of weakness that Kryptonite caused. It was unfair that she couldn’t shake the sharp pricks of agitation. Unfair that the small voice at the back of her mind, the one that she so rarely let speak for her, said that the lab was where Lena was her most Luthor-ish, where the worst of her impulses were given free reign. It didn’t help that Kara had now seen just how dark Lena could go, that there were lines that when pushed Lena absolutely would cross.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey Kids! If you're looking for accurate science then this is not the fic for you! If, however, you're looking for badly written science that is dumb by the show's amazingly low standards then boy do I have a chapter for you!
> 
> Thank you for all the comments and kudos. You guys are awesome!

Lena’s lab didn’t hold the best memories for Kara. Oh, she understood that Lena had done incredible things here. Her research and inventions had saved countless lives, including Kara’s own. But something about it set Kara on edge. It worked under her skin, tight and uneasy, not unlike that first ripple of weakness that Kryptonite caused. It was unfair that she couldn’t shake the sharp pricks of agitation. Unfair that the small voice at the back of her mind, the one that she so rarely let speak for her, said that the lab was where Lena was her most Luthor-ish, where the worst of her impulses were given free reign. It didn’t help that Kara had now seen just how dark Lena could go, that there were lines that when pushed Lena absolutely would cross.

It was why when the elevator doors opened and she stepped between them she was immediately hit with that painfully familiar gut-churning feeling and had to grit her teeth, her stomach jittery enough that she had to concentrate on not spilling the four coffees she had brought with her.

It was ridiculous. But the first step into the lab always took her back to when she’d teleported in and seen Sam restrained. When she’d seen the cell and realised that she couldn’t use her x-ray vision on it, that it hurt to do so, and that Lena - _her_ Lena- was developing anti-Kryptonian technology. Using that technology Lena had easily contained a full powered Kryptonian, one who had pummelled Kara into the ground. She had done what Kara and the DEO had not been able to. She had the technology to not only contain a Kryptonian but to kill one as well. It was when things between her and Lena had started to go so horribly wrong, the first sliver of doubt in her mind that Lena wasn’t who she thought she was. She pushed those thoughts aside, shoulders back, as she scurried across the lab trying not to think that when Lena went off the rails it frankly could have been a lot worse. 

Alex and Kelly were already there waiting for her. They were huddled round some of the instruments and machines, standing close enough to each other that they were practically on top of one another, heads bowed together. A quick scan of the lab revealed no sign of Lena.

“Hey, sorry I’m late,” Kara said rushing over to them. “There are protesters outside Catco blocking the entrance. I had to fly, actually fly, to get away.”

Alex picked up one of the cups and turned it to read the near illegible scribbles on the side. “One soy latte.” She handed it over to a beaming Kelly before grabbing her own cup off the tray. “What are they protesting?” She asked with a quirked brow as she took a sip of coffee.

“Andrea not being in jail. There was a lot of screaming about how she should be arrested, that she shouldn’t be free to run her company, that sort of thing.” Kara looked for a place set down the remaining two cups. She snagged a trolley that only seemed to have a sealed case on top of it and put the coffees down on top of it, one for her and a plain black double shot for Lena. “They were even saying that Catco should be closed.”

Kelly shot her a sympathetic look. “To be fair there are legitimate concerns regarding Andrea. She’s under investigation and yet she’s still allowed to run her company. It might have been better for her to step down and allow the board to run it while the investigation is ongoing. Name someone as interim editor in chief. I’ve been suspended without pay as has everyone else who worked on Obsidian Platinum.”

“Perks of being rich,” Alex rubbed Kelly’s shoulder consolingly as Kelly turned a warm, grateful smile towards her. They were too cute! Kara barely restrained a gleeful little squee. Alex set her coffee down and turned towards Kara, a look of barely concealed mirth on her face. “So.” She stretched the word out, pulling on the O’s in a very suspicious way. Her eyes lit up with mischief as she smirked at Kara. “Did you speak to William?”

“Ugh.”

“That’s not a no.” 

“Yes, I talked to William,” Kara admitted reluctantly. Only bad things were going to come from this conversation. Very bad things. “But about work not about anything else.”

“Why not? Was it against your religion?” Alex finally cracked.

“I panicked!” Kara cried, actually stomping her foot. Just a little. Just a little stomp. Alex threw her head back, cackling away. Even Kelly looked like she was holding back from laughing at Kara’s misfortune, her hand pressed over her lips like she could physically hold it back. “I wish I hadn’t told you,” Kara grumbled. She picked at the lid of her coffee, her thumb flicking at the thin plastic lip.

“Did you have religion on Krypton?” Kelly asked brightly over the sound of Alex nearly choking on her own laughter. “You don’t have to answer that if you don’t want to. If it’s difficult to talk about I completely understand.”

It was difficult to talk about. Usually. But Kelly had an air about her that made it easy to talk to her about subjects that would usually be uncomfortable. She had this quality, one that must be very useful for a therapist, that didn’t just put you at ease but made you want to open up. 

“We did. Do. I mean, we worshipped Rao so yeah we have a religion.”

“I take it that it wasn’t against your religion.” Kelly tilted her head in patient interest ignoring Alex who was still doubled over.

“Nope.” Kara tried to keep it cheery, maybe if she looked like she wasn’t bothered Alex would stop laughing and teasing her.

Kelly tilted her head her eyes crinkling in concern but before she could ask anything Alex interrupted her. 

“It was against their interest,” she said

“That’s not -” Kara huffed in frustration. Alex looked smug, which was rich considering she’d spent years avoiding dating and sex. 

Kelly looked confused. “I think you’ve lost me. Was sexual activity not a thing on Krypton?”

“We uh, y’know, didn’t have to have sex to procreate.” Kara coughed. Her shirt felt uncomfortably tight, the collar itching her neck. She hooked a finger under it and tugged. “Where’s Lena? Shouldn’t she be here?”

“Said she had some files to sort,” Alex replied.

“Really?” Kelly said. “Well, it makes sense. Natural births are a huge health risk for the mother, not to mention messy and time consuming.” Kelly sipped her coffee. “So I take it you had some kind of artificial womb? And wow, how did that emotionally affect the mother and child? Did it have an affect bonding?”

“We had what was called the Birthing Matrix and all ranked Kryptonians were conceived and born through it.”

“Ranked?”

“Those in the Guilds. Uh, I suppose the guildless probably did conceive through more, um, traditional means. I never really thought about it before.” She shrugged. “I was just a child when Krypton was destroyed so I didn’t really, y’know, didn’t really occur to me to think about it.”

She’d known that a husband would be chosen for her, someone who was a good match, that the Birthing Matrix would eventually give them a child. There hadn’t been any need to think about it when she was a child, she’d been more focused on her studies and getting into the Science Guild, being the best she could be. Romance and dating and - _Rao!_ \- definitely sex hadn’t even entered her head until she was on earth and that had been one hell of a cultural shift. 

Kelly gave her arm a squeeze, her smile sympathetic. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to bring up something so traumatic. Other cultures are fascinating and I just really love learning about them.”

“No, it’s okay.” Kara smiled back at her. Over Kelly’s shoulder Alex had sobered up, her humour dropping off of her and replaced with a mixture of concern and a little bit of happy pride at Kara and Kelly getting along.

“But since it’s not a religious or cultural thing then what’s the problem with William?”

“There’s no problem with William he’s… he’s… tall,” Kara finished lamely. He was tall and broad and muscley, had a British accent and more than one woman at Catco had commented on his hair and how they’d love to scrunch their fingers in it. He looked like the lead for a cheesy Hallmark movie or, if given an artfully ripped shirt and a rapier, like the man-meat that graced trashy romance novels.

Alex started snickering again. “And that’s a bad thing?”

Kara began picking at the lid of her coffee again. She looked over to the door. This would be a perfect time for Lena to show up and save her from this conversation. 

Kelly’s expression had turned concerned again. “You know you don’t need to make up an excuse not to sleep with him. It is okay to just say no.”

That was easier said than done. Of course she knew what Kelly was saying was true, if their position were reversed she’d be saying the exact same thing. But she wasn’t immune to societal expectation and pressures, even though she knew they were stupid. And while Kelly meant well it really only made Kara feel worse. Like she had somehow failed the entirety of womanhood by using a pathetic lie to get out of something she should have been secure enough to just say no to.

“Kelly’s right,” Alex said dropping the teasing and shifting effortlessly into big sister mode. “You like William, don’t you?”

“Yeah.” She sounded like a sullen teenager.

“It’s okay to want to take it slow. It’s been a while since Mon-El.” Alex reached out to Kara and put her hand on her shoulder, making sure she caught her eye. She cocked her head as she regarded Kara. “It’s natural to feel hesitant. You don’t have to go all in straight away.”

“I know.” Kara felt like she was a child being consoled.

“If things are continuing with William what are you going to tell him?” Kelly enquired gently.

“I don’t know.”

“You could just marry him,” Alex suggested unhelpfully and Kara glared at her. Alex held her hands up in a placating gesture. Her eyes lit up and her lips spread into a grin. “Or you could just explain to him that you’re basically a panda.”

“Alex!”

“Who’s a panda?”

They all jumped. Kara pivoted on her heel towards Lena who had walked in unannounced and unnoticed. How had she managed to sneak up on them? Was there something in the lab that dampened Kara’s powers? She looked about wildly, trying to see if there was a power dampening mast or object giving off ominous flashes. Her eyes landed back on Lena who looked back at them eyes wide both eyebrows raised high on her forehead. All three of them radiated guilty energy, which was ridiculous. They hadn’t done anything.

“No one, no one is a panda!” Kara said resolutely, cutting through the air with her hands. Lena didn’t look convinced, she looked highly sceptical. Her eyes trailed up and over Kara’s shoulder like she expected a panda to be hidden somewhere behind her. “No pandas here,” Kara reaffirmed which just made Lena squint suspiciously at her. 

“Okay?” Lena said hesitantly.

Kara glanced over Lena and took in her casual apparel, jeans and a soft long sleeved grey top, the material thin for the summer weather; she had pulled the sleeves half way down her hands. It was such a rare sight to see Lena in jeans that Kara’s eyes felt the need to track her up from her ankle to her waist. They were blue and they fit snugly around Lena’s hips and Kara’s gaze lingered. _Lena has hips._ Kara frowned at her own stupid thought. Of course Lena had hips - why wouldn’t she have hips? All bi-pedal creatures had hips. She looked back up at Lena’s face, concentrating on the beginnings of an irritated frown forming on her face. She clapped her hands together. “You got what you need? We ready to start?” 

Lena’s frown didn’t let up, it had turned a little suspicious and guarded and Kara tried not to squirm under her gaze. The neck of her shirt felt tight again, like it had a mind of its own and lived to gently strangle Kara. She resisted the urge to yank on it.

“Is that coffee?” Lena asked her brow arching as she turned a steely eye to the cup that was meant for her.

“Oh. Here.” Kara picked it up and offered it to Lena.

“No food or drink in my lab,” Lena said to Kara before turning to Alex. “You should know better.”

“Coffee is an exception to the rules,” Alex answered with an easy shrug.

Lena held her disapproving look for a beat and then sighed in defeat. She took the offered cup from Kara. “I suppose I can make an exception. Thank you.” Lena sipped the coffee and made a small hum of content before setting it back down. “Brainy called, there’s been another incident. 

“What?” Kara exclaimed. “I told him to call me.”

“I thought he was meant to be working with us,” Alex said. She pulled her phone out and scowled at it, her thumb moving across the screen, no doubt sending an irate message to Brainy. 

“He tried to call you Kara but said you weren’t answering. And since this is my lab and I know how to use all the equipment here, weird I know, I told him that he wouldn’t be required.”

“Urgh, my phone!” Kara patted down her pockets only now realising that she didn’t have her phone with her.

“That wasn’t your decision to make.” Alex crossed her arms; she cocked her hip to the side like she did when she was gearing up for a fight. Kara’s heart sank. This was the first time Alex and Lena had worked together since they’d taken down Lex. They’d worked well together then, very professional, not quite buddies but then they never really had been. Friends, but more like professional friends. Kara had been the one carrying all the tension with Lena when they’d last worked together and Alex had been the one to smooth it over. Kara wasn’t at all prepared for Alex to suddenly look so defensive.

“It’s my lab so it absolutely was my decision to make.” Lena crossed her arms right back at Alex, her jaw clenched. “Besides, he had some things he wanted to take care of.”

“What things?” Alex’s eyes narrowed.

“I don’t know, I didn’t ask,” Lena replied tersely.

Oh yeah, they were both definitely gearing up for a fight.

“Okay,” Kelly said, eyes wide and clearly picking up on the rising tension. She inserted herself between Alex and Lena, making sure to catch Alex’s eyes as she slipped her hands up Alex’s chest and to her shoulders, her fingers flexing as she squeezed them. Alex loosened fractionally, but her eyes were still hard, still suspicious as she regarded Lena. 

“What did Brainy say about the new incident?” Kara asked trying to draw Lena’s gaze away from Alex.

Lena turned to Kara. “Jeffrey Stewart, mid-forties, was supposed to be picking his children up from school. He saw his eldest daughter talking to a boy and attacked him. He tried to run him down with his car.” Kara sucked in a breath. “Fortunately he only struck a glancing blow. Upon talking to the police he said that he thought he was in a VR simulation. I’ve pulled up his files already.” She picked up her tablet and pressed the screen, her eyes scanning over what was there. “He liked to play out apocalypse scenarios where he had to protect his family by any means necessary.”

“Well, at least he was protecting people in his simulation,” Kara said. She let out a long breath. It made her feel better to know that not all of these simulations were about revenge and purposefully hurting people just for the sake of it.

“Except that he populated these scenarios with people from his life,” Lena said. “Colleagues, neighbours, people he went to school with and, yes, even his children’s friends. They were the people he was protecting his family from.”

Kara’s shoulders slumped in defeat. Did everyone have these violent fantasies? 

“Ideally,” Lena continued, “I would like to have a scan of one of these victims but at present that doesn’t seem likely to happen.”

“Don’t you own most the hospitals in this city? And the prison?” Despite Kelly’s best efforts Alex’s shoulders were still stiff as she regarded Lena. “Why can’t you throw around a little bit of that Luthor influence and money?”

“Because it’s not my influence and money to throw around.” Lena ground her teeth making Kara wince in sympathy for her molars. “I don’t own any of these things, LuthorCorp does and the board is in charge and, more pertinently, Lillian is the one holding all the strings. I assure you there is very little I can do with her breathing down my neck. It was difficult enough arranging you all to have access to my lab without her knowing.”

They stilled at that the very real threat of Lillian Luthor being free and at large. 

“She’s going to find out that you’re helping us,” Kara said quietly.  
“More than likely,” Lena agreed. “But for now she’s purposefully turning a blind eye. I don’t think she has much interest in what we’re doing and, fortunately, in this new reality she is regarded well by the public and must make the effort to remain in the public’s good graces. I doubt that the grieving mother card will protect her from the public’s ire should she make a move against Supergirl.”

Kara pushed her fingers under glasses and rubbed her eyes. Not for the first time she had, without even meaning to, asked Lena to put herself in danger for her. “If your mother does anything, says anything to you, you tell me.”

“She’s not my mother,” Lena answered reflexivity. “And ‘anything’?” she smiled sardonically. “I still have to talk to her. I can make a list if you like, taker detailed notes of what she says to me but I think you’ll find it largely uninteresting.”

“Lena, I’m serious.”

“So am I. I can handle Lillian.”

“Look,” Kelly said, eyes flickering between them all. “We only have a limited time, right? So let’s get on with this. What’s next Lena?”

Lena took a deep breath. She rubbed her fingers along her brow. “This way, follow me.” She led them across the lab, talking all the while. “Presently I have two scans of two different brains to show you. First is patient B212. Male, 44 years old at time of death. He was killed in a motorcycle accident and thankfully was wearing his helmet. Unfortunately for him he wasn’t wearing anything else.”

“You mean he wasn’t wearing any other protective gear,” Kara said. They came to a stop by a machine and Lena pressed a button, the instrument humming to life.

“I mean he was naked from the neck down and attempting to show off to his friends.” Lena’s fingers danced across the touch screen for the machine and four arms unfurled with what looked to be lights fitted to them. “Fortunately for us he was a LuthorCorp employee and on his contract signed that he was comfortable leaving his cadaver for our research purposes.”

“His family must be thrilled,” Alex muttered.

“Is that legal?” Kelly questioned.

“Take it up with the unions.” Lena pressed the screen again and the lights flicked on, and then a full 3D holograph of a human brain floated before them. 

“Wow,” Alex let out.

“Oh, cool!” Kara angled her head round it. “Is this actually a scan of his brain?”

“It is,” Lena affirmed. “Patient B212 died before Obsidian Platinum was released, he never used VR. Subject K12 however did.” Lena’s pressed the screen again and another brain appeared. 

“We don’t get to hear about K12’s grizzly demise?” Alex joked weakly.

“K12 is still very much alive.” A couple more button presses and the images of the brains changed, showing something more typical of an MRI. “K12 is late twenties, female and used the Obsidian lenses extensively. More importantly she used them in a very similar fashion to those who have suffered from VR hallucinations.”

“To hurt people?” Kara asked, quietly. “So potentially she could be a future victim of these incidents.

“Yes.” Lena pulled in a long slow breath. “And yes. Now, Alex, Kelly, it’s my understanding that the both of you have used Obsidian Platinum.”

“We have,” Alex answered taking a small step closer to Kelly eyes locked on Lena. “Why?”

“Because it would be beneficial to compare our current two subjects to a brain that has used the lenses but didn’t use them for such, ah -”

“Violent,” Kara suggested.

“Violent,” Lena agreed. “Such violent means.”

“No,” Alex said flatly.

“Wait, Alex.” Kelly placed a placating hand on Alex’s arm. “You have the equipment here to do the scan?”

Lena nodded.

“Still no,” Alex said again.

“I used the lenses more extensively than Alex did but my sessions were tied into my patient’s simulations.” Kelly tapped her finger against her lip thoughtfully. “I don’t think it would give you the results you’re hoping for.”

“I’m not hoping for any results. Well.” Lena tipped her head. “I’m hoping we’ll quickly find out what’s causing these incidents. Obviously. And then a means to stop them from happening again. We’re just gathering data at this point.”

“You’re not scanning my brain and you’re definitely not scanning Kelly’s brain,” Alex said forcefully.

“Wow, okay, that is my decision.” Kelly turned on Alex.

“It’s a simple procedure,” Lena explained patiently. “I’ve used this equipment on myself and I assure you it’s painless and non-intrusive.”

“I don’t care how non-intrusive it is,” Alex bit out. 

“I used the lenses as well,” Kara pondered aloud. For an hour tops but she’d still used them. Alex turned to Kara with a _‘seriously?’_ expression, clearly less than thrilled about Kara reminding them all of this. She looked like she’d very much like to stuff a sock in Kara’s mouth and then duct tape it closed.

“There’s no chance in hell she’s scanning your brain, Kara!” Alex seethed. “Am I the only person who remembers that she tried to mind control the entire planet?”

That knocked the wind out of them all. The holographic projector hummed cheerily into the tense silence of the lab. Kara held her breath and stared at Alex, at the hard line of her shoulders and the anger in her eyes. Lena looked like she’d been struck. Her head had jerked back and her eyes were wide, her already pale skin deathly white. 

Alex glared at Lena. Kelly had taken a step back and was watching Alex warily. Lena stood stock still, rigid like she’d been petrified. She stared unblinking at Alex, her eyes wet. This was where Kara should step in, where she should voice her words of defence and unwavering support for Lena. She’d done it dozens of times before. But her throat was tight. Her lungs burned white hot like she’d inhaled her own ice breath. Even if her throat wasn’t constricted, even if the wind wasn’t frozen in her lungs and her heart suddenly like an unliftable weight in her chest, the words weren’t there. The trust wasn’t there so she couldn’t do it. She could only stare helplessly as Alex took a step towards Lena, her eyes hard.

“Because I do remember,” Alex said dangerously low. “No one here is giving you a scan of their brain. No one here is giving you anything like that.”

Lena’s jaw dropped a fraction of an inch, her lips parted and a ragged, hard expulsion of air escaped them. “I made a very serious misjudgement,” She said haltingly, the words rough like they were being dragged up from the bottom of her throat. “One that I am trying to rectify. I am sorry-”

“You’re sorry?”

“Yes. I made a mistake. One that I will regret for the rest of my life.” She swallowed. “I wasn’t in my right mind and I - I was hurt and I lashed out.”

“Lashing out is saying something hurtful. Lashing out is not robbing billions of people of their free will. And a mistake?” Alex barked a harsh laugh and shook her head. “A mistake is not spending weeks planning on lobotomising everyone. It’s definitely not having been stopped once, been given a clean slate, and being one of a handful of people who remember their life before Crisis using that fresh chance to do the exact same thing again. So no, _you_ don’t get the keys to anyone’s mind.”

“Alex.” Kara reached out and took Alex by the elbow. “Alex,” she said again softy. “Come on. Enough. Just… Let’s go.” She tugged on Alex’s arm and, thankfully, Alex let herself be pulled gently away. Kara glanced back over her shoulder. Kelly had stayed by Lena, she shot a worried glance over at Kara and Alex. Lena was staring down at the ground, her hands curled into fists.

“What’s going on?” Kara asked Alex quietly once they were far enough away.

“Seriously? You can’t be serious about letting her scan any of our brains.” Alex scowled. “Especially yours.”

“She agreed to help us and you agreed that it was a good idea.”

“To use her equipment not to let her tamper with our brains.” 

“A scan isn’t tampering. You were the one who said I was being too harsh on her. I was ready to treat her the same as Lex and it was you who made me reconsider that. What changed?”

“Nothing changed. Look, back when we stopped her the first time you were right that we should help her and I am trying to honour that, but, Kara.” Alex blew about a breath, ran her hand through her hair. “Trust is earned and she broke that trust. She helped Lex, and he might not have got as far ahead of us as he did if she hadn’t sided with him. That isn’t something we can just sweep under the rug. The fact that she’s not rotting in a jail cell somewhere is me showing that I trust her to do better. Giving her that chance doesn’t mean giving her the keys to our brains.”

“Right. Just.” Kara shuffled her feet. She hated that Alex had a point. “Can you try to be a bit nicer about it?”

“No, kid gloves are for kids. She’s a whole grown woman who can own her mistakes.” Alex glanced back over to where Lena and Kelly were. Her brow drew down as she watched them, her lips pressing into a thin line. She turned back to Kara. She exhaled and ran her hand threw her hair, clearly just as frustrated as Kara. She stepped closer to Kara, her head ducked down towards her and her voice low. “Lena said it herself; Lillian is pulling the strings at LuthorCorp. We let Lena scan our brains then those scans will be on file somewhere and Lillian will be able to get her hands on them. We don’t need any more information about Kryptonians falling into Luthor hands.”

Kara looked back over to Lena. She had her head down, her shoulders low and curled forward like she was trying to make herself smaller as she concentrated on the tablet in her hand. Kelly stood close her, head bowed trying to catch Lena’s eye and her lips moving. Lena nodded along to whatever Kelly was saying. 

It wasn’t as if Kara didn’t understand where Alex was coming from. Lena had crossed a line and the path back wasn’t smooth. Kara couldn’t force Alex or any of the others to forgive and trust Lena again, that was for them to decide on their own. 

The entire situation was awful and she still didn’t know what to do about it, could barely even think about it. If she were being honest with herself she been deliberately not thinking about Lena and how she would fit back in her lives. It would be too much to ask that she wouldn’t have to do anything. Maybe with time Lena would just slowly reintegrate herself with the group and there wouldn’t be any need for painfully awkward conversations. With time perhaps that small flicker of anger she knew she still felt would gutter and die. They would just be able to rely on whatever natural pull between them existed to bridge the gap.

But that wasn’t going to happen and it was childish and cowardice to think that it would. More likely that Lena would slowly fade from her life if one of them didn’t make the effort to fix what was broken between them.

Kara sighed and turned back to Alex. “She’s here and helping us, doesn’t that prove that she’s owning her mistakes? It’s awkward for all of us but we don’t need to kick her when she’s down. We should help her back up, that’s what we’re doing for Brainy. He made a mistake and we’re helping him so shouldn’t we do the same for her?”

Alex looked at her like she disagreed with that. Like maybe a little bit of bullying was character building or something. She exhaled long and slow and nodded at Kara. “Their situations are completely different and you know it but fine. I’ll try to be nicer.”

Kara smiled and jostled her with her shoulder. “That’s all I ask.”

Lena and Kelly had bifurcated both of the brains when they made it back over. Lena turned from them, her head dipping and her hair falling like a closing curtain to hide her face. 

“Hey,” Kelly said offering them both a warm, albeit hesitant, smile. “We’re just comparing the posterior cingulate cortexes of these brains. Looks like K12 suffers from PTSD.”

“Any chance it’s caused by the VR and only mimics the damage caused by PTSD?” Alex asked. She put an arm around Kelly’s shoulder and pulled her in gently; Kelly allowed it, leaning into Alex and relaxing. 

“K12 likely already suffered from PTSD,” Lena replied. 

“Looking at the clouding on some of these scans K12 has also had several concussions,” Kara added. “She should probably give up whatever sport she’s playing.”

“We’ll need more data but for now I think we should be looking to see if extended VR use, and especially the kind of use where the user immersed themselves in violent situations, actually causes damage to their default mode network. Given the nature of the simulations that the victims of the incidents have been running I wouldn’t be surprised.” Lena paused, her brow scrunching like it did when she was thinking. “There isn’t any study yet into the extended use of Obsidian Platinum and its effects on the brain. Given the way it works it isn’t a stretch to hypothesis that it will cause changes there even if the simulations are harmless.”

“Can we compare the precunius of both brains?” Alex asked. Lena pressed at the tablet in her hands and a part of both brains separated from the main mass and enlarged.

They stood in a line and all stared at the brains in silence. Tense thick suffocating silence. 

“I don’t think I’ve ever felt more uncomfortable in my entire life,” Kelly whispered. “And I once got pulled up front by my drill Sergeant who then screamed in my face for twenty minutes.”

“I don’t even know what I should be looking for,” Kara admitted. She rubbed her fingers across her palms in soothing circles. Alex was still stiff with anger; it rolled off of her in waves, while Lena stood at the other side of Kara a black hole of defeated misery. Having them both in the same room at the same time was a mistake, one that she couldn’t possibly have predicted. Wasn’t she the one who should have been radiating intense anger at Lena? She looked over to Alex who stood with her arms folded, her posture stiff and her jaw clenched. This display couldn’t just be for Lena, could it? Something else had to be going on.

“We need more data,” Lena said. “Kelly, do either you or Brainy have access to the Obsidian records?”

“Yes, but it’ll just be their personnel files. We weren’t looking at scans of their brains so the best you’ll get is some records of brain waves as they used the lenses.”

Lena raised a brow. “That actually could be very useful.”

“Then I will get it for you.”

“Okay!” Kara clapped her hands together determined to salvage this so that it wasn’t a complete waste of their morning. “How about we call it quits for today. Lena and I will compile a list of what kind of data we need to gather. This is just a start, not the most impressive starts admittedly, but a start nonetheless! We are getting somewhere.” Just painfully slowly. But if she sounded enthused about it then it would feel like a victory. Kara reached into the back pocket of her jeans and pulled out the crumpled leaflet she had stuffed in there. She turned to Alex. “Alex, I have something for you if you’re up for it.”

“I’m up for it. What you got?” Alex dropped her hands to her hips and looked down at the flier in Kara’s hand. “Digital Dependants,” she read off the leaflet. She looked up at Kara bemused.

“William gave this to me. It’s for a support group for those who became addicted to VR and are now struggling without it.” She handed the leaflet over to Alex. “I was going to go myself but -”

“You suck at being undercover?” Alex grinned at her.

“I do not!”

“Sure, Kara Liberty.”

“I’m never telling you anything ever again,” Kara groused. “You have more experience using VR than I do. All I did was float about for a bit and talk. You’ll be able to connect to them more.”

“I’ll look into it.” Alex pocketed the leaflet and then reached for Kelly’s hand. Kelly smiled warmly at her, whatever brief tension that had existed between them gone. “We done here?” Alex asked.

“I think so,” Kara replied. 

Alex and Kelly said quick goodbyes and left. Lena pulled a stool out and sat down; she stared up at the floating brains.

“So, what do we need?” she asked turning towards Kara.

“Like you said, we need more data.” Kara crossed her arms loosely and joined Lena in staring at the floating brains. “Maybe we can find a way to scan the brains of those affected? Like, you could set up a program or a group study for them to come forward.”

“Sounds unethical.”

Kara frowned. “Because you’ve never crossed some ethics lines before?”

“Obviously I have but I don’t know how I would set this up without Lillian knowing.” She paused, head cocked to the side her brow furrowed. “Or Andrea for that matter. I meant what I said I’ll help you with this but I won’t betray Andrea. What we’re doing feels like it comes very close to sabotaging her and she already has enough to deal with.”

“That’s very -” _annoying_ “-admirable of you.” If Kara went ahead and wrote this article then it would be the nail in Andrea’s figurative coffin. Lena had to know that.

“I’ll look through LuthorCorp medical records to see if we already have anyone on file that have used Obsidian Platinum extensively. Very illegal and, yes, unethical obviously, but for a good cause.”

Was it unfair of her to ask Lena to cross some ethical lines? Potentially they could save lives with this work, even if all she did was write an article that warned people of the dangers Obsidian tech still proved. Kara sighed. “This was easier when the DEO was still around.” 

Lena picked imaginary lint from off her jeans, brow furrowed. “The DEO still exists. The destruction of one building wasn’t enough to end a multi-national para-military group. There are still several facilities in the US alone.”

“What?” Kara stared at Lena. That couldn’t be right; she’d know if there were other DEO facilities. The DEO had only been one small branch of the government and without its main base of operations, its director, and Lex then it couldn’t possibly still be functioning. “Well who’s running it?”

“I don’t know.”

Kara tugged on the hem of her shirt. This was just great. Another worry to add to her ever increasing list of concerns. “Why didn’t Brainy or Alex tell me?” Why hadn’t Lena volunteered this information sooner?

“I imagine that they didn’t know. Why would Lex share that information with them? I barely know anything about it.” She had turned towards Kara, frowning. “And not to say something disparaging about either Alex or Brainy but I would hazard a guess that they didn’t think to look into it. That they both assumed that the DEO would still function in the same manner that it had on the previous Earth.”

Kara shot Lena a disgruntled look. She was coming very close to implying that Alex and Brainy were careless and had been bad at their jobs.

“It honestly astounds me how little thought any of you seem to have put into considering the implications of our existing on a new Earth,” Lena continued. Her eyes widened as she blew out a long breath. “It’s an entire new reality, nothing is as it was. People you knew you might never have met, adventures and evil you fought happened differently. Look at the Daxamite invasion; it happened completely differently on this earth. There was a coalition of Superheroes to fight it off. When you get home try googling yourself. Just don’t use LexSearch, or any Luthor owned web browser for that matter, the data mining is horrific.”

“Sounds like you’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this new earth,” Kara mumbled. She hated that Lena was right. She hadn’t put much thought into this new Earth and what it meant going forward. How much of her life here had been different? “I’m glad Alex quit the DEO when she did. What?”

Lena was looking at Kara sympathetically. “Alex didn’t quit she was forced out by Lex.”

“No, she had enough and quit.”

“Because Lex wanted her gone so he could install his own director.”

Kara ground her teeth. Lena made it sound like Alex had no autonomy over her decision to leave, like it had all been part of Lex’s plan. “Brainy was the director after Alex.”

“Exactly, and who was Brainy working for?”

Lex. He had been working for Lex in a stupid misguided attempt to save them all. “Then why didn’t he just have Alex killed?”

“You know why. It would be a waste of a perfectly good resource. Not to mention that it would draw your attention.”

Kara felt sick at the suggestion that Lex might have harmed Alex, worse that the suggestion had come from her. She knew Lena was right. If Lex had even hurt Alex then she didn’t know what she would have done but a whole lot of her ethics and morals would have been tossed out of the window. Probably alongside Lex himself. 

“You need to shut down the other DEO sites,” she told Lena with as much authority as she could muster.

Lena’s eyes widened in disbelief. “You really think I have that kind of power? Kara.” She closed her eyes and pressed her thumb to the deepening creases between her brows. “I keep trying to explain to you. It is not my company on this Earth. I’m not even on the board for godsake. I can’t just waltz in there and demand that they close down a billion dollar private security firm. There are bases set up in Europe and Asia, all over the world! Dozens of countries have contracts with LuthorCorp for the DEO to support and protect their citizens from aliens and meta-humans. The DEO on this earth isn’t an off-the-books government black-ops group. It’s a private owned security and military group that publicly protects people from threats. People wouldn’t stand for it suddenly closing down. Governments wouldn’t stand for it. Billions of dollars would be lost and not to mention thousands of jobs.” Lena ran her hand through her hair. “Even if I was the CEO of LuthorCorp I couldn’t just close down the DEO. It’s too big. It would take years to dismantle. If I even suggested it the board would have me removed.”

“Fantastic. That’s great.” She sounded like a child who hadn’t got her way. Lena looked up at her, eyes flickering back and forth in minute movements like she was trying to read what Kara was thinking. Finally she threw up her hands.

“If it’s the ethical and legal implications of what we’re doing that are an issue then just blame it all on me,” she said. 

“That’s not - that’s-” Kara blew out a breath. “It’s just that before I didn’t have to think about these things. Before if we needed to hack someone’s medical records it was done by the DEO and it just felt, I dunno, better that it was a government organisation doing it.”

“Yes, the government breaching a person’s privacy is much better,” Lena said sarcastically. “But I understand. It was easier when it wasn’t you having to make the decisions to cross those lines.”

She made it sound so… cowardly, like she was abdicating responsibility. Worse still she sounded like she did actually understand. But maybe that was because Lena was used to be being the one accepting the responsibility of unpopular choices. Kara didn’t like to think that she had left Alex and J’onn to make the harder calls while she publicly reaped the applause, but there was some truth in that. 

“I just meant with the DEO there were checks and balances. Paperwork to every decision.” She shrugged. “I was operating within the law and now, I dunno, it feels like I’m a vigilante. There’s a lot more weight to my decisions. A lot more pressure to get it right.”

“Just because the DEO was a government organisation doesn’t mean that it wasn’t problematic. It didn’t become an evil organisation just because this new reality put Lex at the helm.”

“The old DEO did a lot of good,” Kara insisted not liking where this was going.

“At what cost?” Lena leaned forward, her arms resting on her legs as she stared challengingly up at Kara. There was a light in her eyes that Kara hadn’t seen in a long time. The one she’d get when they were discussing new tech and its implications for the world. Or when they found themselves on other sides of a debate. As best Kara could remember she usually came out on top in those debates. “There’s always a price to pay. And isn’t that your point? You got to be the face of good, protecting the people from villains, while someone else behind the scenes carried out the more morally ambiguous work and now you don’t have that.”

“You make it sound like the DEO was always bad.”

“I think that you want to only see the good in it because you worked with it and Alex was in charge.”

“I’ve stood against it before.”

“Sure, when someone else was in charge. Then you had a figure you could place the blame on, it was safe for you to question its motivation and results. General Haley was the poster child for government stooge; she was an easy authority figure to rebel against. But once Alex was back in the director’s seat you fell back in line.” Lena paused, waiting for Kara to add something, to refute Lena’s argument. But all Kara had was silence. Lena’s words swirled in her head, hot and sharp cutting down any counter-argument she might make before it could even form. The corner of Lena’s mouth twitched, she knew she was winning this. “How many reforms did Alex make when she was in charge? Did she make it a better organisation? How many aliens were locked up under her tenure?”

“Criminals. The DEO apprehended criminals.” The counter felt weak even if it was true.

“Who decided they were criminals? Who represented them? Was there a trial? What happened after they were locked up?”

Kara sucked on her lips. James had said something similar when the DEO had apprehended Maxwell Lord. That he couldn’t support an organisation that ignored due process. Kara had been so focused on stopping a bad guy she hadn’t even considered the implications. 

She crossed and un-crossed her arms. Scrubbed her hands on her pants. How had they even got onto this discussion? All Kara wanted was to work out with Lena what data they needed to gather and how to get it. Now she was aggressively tugging on her sleeves and questioning everything she had achieved while working with the DEO. She had saved lives! Wasn’t that what mattered? And she’d done it with the DEO’s assistance. She was certain that the criminals that she’d taken in had been just that - and she trusted that the DEO had handled them correctly.

_But what if they hadn’t?_

What if Supergirl wasn’t seen as a beacon of hope and compassion by many but instead as a government agent who unlawfully apprehended aliens? She’d never questioned what happened to those she brought in; she had just trusted the system. A system that she herself had written articles decrying. Kal had never worked with the DEO, he’d claimed because they had kryptonite but even after they’d handed over their cache of it he had still done his own thing. He’d also never dismantled or fought against it, hadn’t even questioned her involvement with them, so he couldn’t have been that against them.

“We’re getting off track,” Kara said. She felt like Lena had shifted the ground from out under her feet. On top of all her new concerns she didn’t need to now be questioning every past action she had taken, second guessing all her choices. “We need to focus on the problem at hand.”

“Alright,” Lena said slowly. She turned on the stool and looked up at the scans of the brains still being projected. “What’s next?”

Good question. Kara had no idea. They needed data but Kara had no idea what kind of data they should be collecting. “We need to find out what’s causing some VR users to experience these incidents and not others.”

Had Lena always thought that about the DEO? She’d told Kara that she didn’t trust the government but Kara had never thought that distrust would extend to the DEO. Every time she had worked with the DEO had she just been holding her nose and secretly hating everything about it? 

Kara fiddled with her glasses. Lena was still watching her, waiting for Kara to give her directions on how to proceed. Rao, Kara missed J’onn. He’d know exactly what was next to do. He’d have been several steps ahead, already anticipating the various outcomes. Kara was scrambling to keep up. She’d only just started on this and she was already steps behind. They needed to find a way to anticipate when an incident would occur.

Kara looked up at the brains, specifically at K12. Three separate incidents so far; this was looking less like something for Kara Danvers to write an article on and more something for Supergirl to get her hands dirty with. What if some outside force was causing this? Had they been wrong about ending Leviathan? What if this was all just part of their plan and Kara had been dancing to their tune all along?

“You’re right about needing to see a scan of one of the brains of the victims. I just don’t see how we’re going to do that.” The handy part about working for a government organisation was that you could just take in one of these victims and scan their brain. It would probably be kidnapping if she were to just pick up either Kurt Trammel or Carolyn Davis and bring them down to Lena’s lab. “That option isn’t available to us so we need to identify any potential victims going forward. How did you know that K12 used the VR to create violent simulations?”

Lena’s eyes flickered up to the brain. “She’s a LuthorCorp employee,” she said after some consideration. “Obsidian should have a database that will have their information. We can establish who is a high risk of succumbing to this delusion. I can also talk to Andrea, she was in charge and answered directly to Gemma Cooper, perhaps she knows more than she’s letting on.”

“Okay.”

Lena smiled at her encouragingly. “It’s a start Kara. You can’t expect to get the exact results that you want straight away.”

“I know, it’s just frustrating.” Kara crossed her arms and stared up at the brains. “I just don’t get it. I don’t understand what would lead someone to want to submerse themselves in a simulation where they hurt other people. I understand anger, I understand say playing a violent video game to blow off a little steam but this is different. It feels personal. These people are parents, they’re productive members of our communities, and they’re harbouring this vindictive violence inside of them. I don’t understand why!”

“I understand it,” Lena said quietly. Kara turned to her, dread curdling in her stomach. Lena stared at her hands resting in her lap. They were palm up, her long fingers gently curled in wards. Her jaw was tight, her lip quivered as she sucked in a breath. “How a very specific kind of anger and hurt could lead you to make some questionable choices. How it breeds vindictiveness and a desire to hurt someone in return. People don’t like to feel helpless, they like to be in control and sometimes the only way to feel that control is to hurt someone. To take it out on them. I’m not saying it’s right but I understand it.”

Kara’s blood ran cold. Lena wouldn’t meet her eyes, was still staring down at her own hands like she was holding something in them, the consequences of her own actions painted over them. Her heart was beating harder, faster, Kara could hear it, could see the pulse point in Lena’s neck jumping with it.

“It’s addictive. It feels good for a moment and then… then it feels awful and the only way to shift that awful feeling is to go back and do it again. And before you know it your trapped in this prison of your own design and you can’t even imagine a way out of it. Don’t even want to find a way out.” Lena’s voice was small and distant, barely above a whisper. “It sounds cliché to say it but it is a cycle. You immerse yourself in your worst thoughts and darkest impulses and very quickly it becomes who you are. It’s all you are. All you can think about. Just an echo chamber of your own hate.” 

“Is that what you were using the lenses for?”

Lena looked up at her slowly, eyes wet. Her mouth trembled. “Yes,” she admitted.

Kara felt like she had swallowed acid. Her throat burned with it; her chest was searing tight pain. Lena’s heart still thrummed like a caged bird but Kara’s felt like it was trying to lift Fort Rozz. “Who were you hurting in these simulations?” She already knew the answer. She knew but she wanted to hear it. Wanted Lena to admit, to stick the knife in a twist it. 

Lena blinked and a single tear fell, carving down her cheek, pale and afraid. “You,” she admitted roughly.

Kara closed her eyes. Her chest felt tight. She couldn’t breathe. She felt like someone had reached up under her ribs and put her heart in a vice. What had she expected? For Lena to deny it? As soon as Lena had started talking she had known where this was going. Lena’s little revenge, her intent to cause Kara pain hadn’t remained carefully crafted fantasy, she had made it a reality. Kara felt sick. She swallowed down the burning lump in her throat. She was trembling, her hands fisted at her sides. She opened her eyes and looked down at Lena, sitting small on her stool and staring up at Kara with wide eyes, tear tracks down her cheeks.

Kara didn’t want to look at her, suddenly couldn’t stand the sight of her. She tore her gaze away and glared across the lab. At the open space and the instruments. Where Lena had developed _non nocere_ , where she’d imprisoned Reign and used kryptonite to subdue her, had experimented on the Harun-el. All those sneaky little under handed things that she’d kept from Kara.

“I understand anger,” Kara said coldly. “I understand it because for a long time I was angry. So angry. I had to work long and hard to control that anger. What you probably don’t know is that kind of anger, it doesn’t just go away. I work every day to not let it consume me. What I don’t understand, what I don’t think I will ever understand is vindictiveness and cruelty. That is a choice. That isn’t just something you feel it is an active choice you make.”

“Kara I-”

“I don’t want to hear it.” Kara looked at her sharply. “I don’t want to hear your excuses. I am angry and more specifically I am still very angry with you.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Are you? Or are you just sorry that your little plan didn’t work and you had to come to me for help when it all went wrong?”

“That’s - that’s not fair. Kara-”

“Isn’t it?” All those weeks where she had struggled to find the words to say to Lena and now it was like a dam had been broken and they were just spilling out, unfiltered and uncontrolled. A deluge of her own hurt and the damage Lena had inflicted on her. “For years I gave you the chance to be better than your family, believed in you and defended you when people questioned or attacked you and you took that and proved me wrong, showed me that you were no better than them. That you’re a Luthor in every way that matters. Actually, no, no, you know what? That isn’t completely fair. You are better than your family but let’s face it the bar was so damn low all you had to do was crawl across it.”

Lena heaved in a breath, her chest and shoulders rising and falling. She made no attempt to stop the tears that flowed freely. Her lips trembled, twisted with the effort to hold back what might be a cry or sob. She stared up at Kara in mute appeal.

“We're done here,” Kara said. She strode past Lena towards the elevator, footsteps heavy and loud on the polished lab floor.

“Kara - wait!”

Kara stopped. Turned back; Lena was on her feet looking across the lab, her shoulders tight and low and her hands balled into quivering fists. 

“Lena.” Kara felt tired. The words, her anger, it had left her spent, worn out and all she wanted to do now was get outside. To get away from the oppressive feel of this lab and away from Lena. “I don’t have anything to say to you.”

The elevator was open and waiting for her. She stepped inside and licked the button, kept her back to Lena until she heard the sliding of the doors. She turned in time to catch a last glimpse of Lena standing alone in the vast empty space of her lab. The closed doors, the sound of the elevator moving, it wasn’t enough to drown out the single sharp broken cry from Lena’s lab.*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lena will absolutely get the chance to say her piece.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It wasn’t that Kara wanted Lena to be right, truthfully, she had never wanted Lena to be more wrong. Because if Lena was right then that meant that Alex - _her Alex_ \- had died. That she was dead and gone. That the woman sitting before her - worry etched on her familiar features - was a stranger with her sister’s memories pasted over her own.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much guys for reading and for the kudos and wonderful comments! You're all awesome! 
> 
> You should read all of Vartox's lines in Matt Berry's voice

The day had a hit a toasty early afternoon high and Kara was loving every second of it. There were birds in the sky, she had a pretty sundress on, and a fruity ice pop in hand. The only way her day could get any better than this was if she had an iced white chocolate mocha in the other hand. As dates with William went this was looking to be the best. Just a long slow walk down to the water front where they silently enjoyed each other’s company. He wasn’t being handsy and she was comfortable in her own space, this felt like progress.

She stepped neatly out of the way of two kids’ roller-blading, smiled at them and looked back up at William. He was grimacing a little, throwing a small annoyed look at the kids, but he smiled when he looked at her. The walk had been her idea. He’d been a little resistant to it, wanting to find a cafe or bar to spend their day off, but he’d warmed up to it once they got going. Listening as she pointed out various shops and stalls that she liked, as she regaled him with horror stories from when she was a lowly assistant and had to run around finding the exact kind of salad Ms. Grant wanted. He hummed along to her words, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his shorts. Usually he did most the talking, telling her about past assignments and when he’d first started as a journalist, but something about today was making her extra chatty. Until he’d bought her the ice pop and then that had taken most of her focus. Not that it had completely shut her up. She could multitask, and was more than capable of still talking with several inches of flavoured ice shoved in her mouth.

Kara looked out across the water; it glittered in the sunlight like a thousand jewels. There had been no oceans left on Krypton and the sight of so much open water always made her heart ache and soar in equal measure. Central City was visible across the ways; it was weird to think that if she’d wanted to see Barry that he was a short ferry ride away. She used to have to hop across universes and now she could drive to see him! For her he was a literal hop, skip and jump away. She should get drinks with him and Iris. That was something she could do now. 

Kara sucked on her ice pop as she considered that. There were a lot of weird things about this new earth, new challenges and changes that didn’t fully make sense, but it had literally brought her friends closer. She’d be able to hang out with Kate. She’d be able to come round for game night!

She made an exited noise and William turned to her with a puzzled smile on his face. 

“Enjoying that ice lolly?” he asked.

“Ice pop, and yes, I am.”

“Good. You can pay me back for it later.”

Kara nearly choked on the ice pop. Pay him… back? He hadn’t made it sound suggestive, he wasn’t even looking at her and was instead frowning down at his phone, but how else was she supposed to take that? 

“Andrea’s arrived at court,” he said, thumb flicking up his screen as he scrolled through his feed. He hissed out a breath from between his teeth. “We should be there covering this.”

Officially Catco weren’t covering the investigation into Andrea and Obsidian North, and their involvement with Leviathan. They were running puff pieces and fashion advice as usual, which was why she and William were able to take a sneaky day off. 

“We wouldn’t be able to remain unbiased, at least not in the public’s eye,” Kara said. Catco had advertised the World Unity Festival, it was difficult to remain impartial when you were the main line of media pushing everyone to just bounce into VR and ignore a cataclysmic event. She sucked on the end of her ice pop. “If we were to cover it Andrea would be accused of trying to buy the public’s favour. Besides, we’re a fashion and women’s wellness magazine. We don’t cover court cases even if they’re cases against out boss and might lead to us all being out of a job.”

“It’s just frustrating!” He scrubbed his hand through his hair. “We are sitting on the highest profile pieces of news and are in the best position to investigate it, to find out the truth about Obsidian and we can’t do anything. We literally have front row seats to Andrea Rojas’s downfall.”

It was frustrating. But not as frustrating as waking up on an entirely new Earth and discovering that the publication you worked for had become nothing more than a fashion magazine, that it no longer covered politics or social movements, that wasn’t interested in exposing the truth to the world but instead quietly offering vapid escapism. She still got her chance to write articles about people she thought were important - she had an interview scheduled with Doctor Shay Veritas later in the month as part of an extended piece highlighting women with disabilities working in STEM - but she already knew she would have to ask her what products she used and her favourite clothing brand, which took a good chunk of her enthusiasm away from the piece. Opportunities were still there, but it was a far cry from when James and Lena had been in charge and Catco was breaking stories.

She was no longer a Pulitzer winning writer. That blew.

She sucked on the ice pop, suddenly frustrated. William was back looking at his phone, practically scowling. 

“Lena Luthor’s there as well.”

“How come you decided to work at Catco?” Kara asked. “It isn’t exactly the hard hitting journalism you usually write.” He’d gone form a world renowned investigative journalist to a guy who wrote articles entitled: _Ladies - how best to please your man!_

“I told you, I was investigating Lex and the job at Catco presented a perfect opportunity to get closer to him.” He scratched at his nose. “And then LuthorCorp sold Catco to Obsidian North and Andrea was who I had to deal with instead. But I suspected that Andrea was probably working with Lex so it felt like a step in the right direction.” They came to a stop and William turned, resting his forearms across the metal railing as he stared forbiddingly out across the water. “I’m still not convinced that Andrea isn’t in it with the Luthor’s. The way that Lena is clinging to her makes me think that whatever the Luthor’s are up to they aren’t finished with Andrea.”

“I think that Lena is just trying to support a friend through a difficult time.”

William smiled at her. “You really do see the best in everyone, don’t you? Unfortunately that is not how the real world works. I wish it did, but people like Andrea Rojas and the Luthor siblings, they don’t see life the same as you or I. Life for them is just a series of games where they vie for power, and people like me and you? We’re just pieces on that game board for them to exploit.”

“Lena’s not like that.” She said it so easily, the defence slipping from her lips without even needed to think about it. She sucked in a surprised breath. 

“I know you were friends with Lena, and I know somewhere along the lines you both stopped being friends, and maybe that’s a good thing. You ever think that the reason she was friends with you was so she could get free good press?”

“No, I’ve never considered that.”

William ignored her. “Andrea Rojas was very nearly responsible for the death of billions of people and whether that was through negligence or design is immaterial. She alone is responsible for that and Lex Luthor is the man who stopped her.”

Kara grits her teeth. “Supergirl stopped Leviathan.”

“With the help of Lex, who nobly sacrificed himself for the greater good.” William snorted. “And now, after that, against what must be the advice of whatever publicists LuthorCorp has hired, his sister publicly stands with Andrea. Why?” William slapped his hand down on the railing and gripped it, roughly twisting his hand around it hard enough that Kara could hear the scrape of his palm against the metal. “It doesn’t make any sense. What we’ve got to ask ourselves is what the Luthor’s stand to gain from this. Because it’s not good press, I can tell you that.”

Kara frowned at him, taking in his profile. He gripped the bar of the railing in both hands, the muscles of his forearm tensing, as he glared across the water. His lips were pressed into a hard line, his brow drawn down. 

He glanced at her, his eyes widening slightly. He turned away and coughed into his hand, his head ducking down, like he’d just remembered she was there and that this was supposed to be a date.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m just frustrated. Lex covered his tracks well and Lillian isn’t likely to give anything up. Lena’s a wild card who might be playing her own game or this might all be part of the Luthor plan.” He paused, his eyes catching hers and noticing the frown on her face. He cleared his throat. “But, that’s a worry for another day. Let’s carry on and keep walking. It’s hard to feel morose on such a nice day with such stunning company.”

William tucked his phone and his hands back in his pockets and they continued on, sauntering at a leisurely pace, but the mood was ruined. Kara couldn’t even enjoy her ice pop now that William had brought up the court case and the Luthor’s potential involvement in it. She was wasting time on this date when she should have been trying to untangle the web that was Lex’s ultimate plan and what Lillian would do next and how Lena fit into it all. Then there was Andrea to consider. Lena was right, Leviathan probably had always planned for Andrea to take the fall for the Unity Festival deaths; she would be seen as a monster who allowed the catastrophe to happen and Leviathan would slither back into the shadows, waiting centuries until they next decided they needed to cull humanities numbers.

Leviathan had been defeated, but did Lillian still have plans for Andrea?

William came to an abrupt stop. They’d arrived at the waterfront where a crowd were gathering. A stage was being set up, a bill board behind proudly displaying Lex’s face and the LuthorCorp logo as well as “The Future Today!” in bold writing. 

“I forgot that they were putting up a statue of Lex.” Kara’s hand fell, not even the deliciously fruitiness of her ice pop could distract her from what was happening. Back on Earth-38 L-Corp had commissioned a statue of Supergirl to honour her key part in thwarting the Daxamite invasion. At the time she hadn’t really appreciated the sentiment, but slowly she had grown used to the statue, been thankful for it, and for the reminder of the good she did and lives that she had helped.

“Of all the stupid damn things. I really want to expose the truth about him,” William growled.

There was a low humming, the sound so low that Kara knew human ears wouldn’t pick it up. She turned, immediately scanning the skies as it grew louder.

“What is it?” William asked.

It was getting louder, growing in intensity, the hum morphing from an innocuous buzz into the base heavy rumble of an engine. Kara slipped her glasses down her nose and looked directly up, squinting. There was a shimmer in the sky that was near indistinguishable from the endless blue. She gasped and grabbed William’s arm, just as the air rippled and a whole ass space ship materialised roughly a hundred foot above them.

“Ah shit. Can we not just have one normal day?” William asked, stepping back.

“Maybe they’re just stopping to ask for directions.” Kara suggested.

Everyone else gathered at the waterfront were now gawping up at the recently revealed, sleek silver space craft. Kara narrowed her vision but couldn’t see through the hull. There was no pattern or identifying design, and she didn’t recognise the model. It wasn’t very big, larger than her own pod, so unlikely an invading force; probably it only had one of two occupants. Unless the occupants were very tiny.

“We should go,” She said tugging on William’s arm. He had his phone out and was snapping a couple of pictures.

“We need to report this.” He was already typing away on his phone, glancing up periodically at the craft as it hovered over the water. 

“Are you Tweeting?”

“Come on.” He grabbed her arm, ignoring her indignation, and tried to drag her away. She allowed it, following after him, glancing back at the crowd of curious people pointing at the craft, with their own phones out. Did no one have any self-preservation instincts?

“We need to make sure people are safe,” she hissed at him as they came to a stop. They were a safe-ish distance away, far enough that they could run if they needed to but close enough that they had a good view of what was going on.

He handed her his phone and took a step away from her, his back to the craft. He gave it a quick glance over his shoulder as if to check it was still there then grinned at her. “Start a live stream.”

“What?” she yelped. “What are you doing?”

“My job, Danvers.” His grin turned cocky.

“Geez.” She held up his phone, already open on his Instagram - and, oh wow, she’d never thought to follow him - started a live stream. “Three… two… one… Live!”

“William Dey, down at National City Waterfront where, extraordinarily, a seemingly alien space craft has just emerged. The craft, which you can see behind me, was hidden by some sort of cloaking device. Thus far the craft remains motionless above the water. National City residents are advised to avoid the area.”

Kara looked up from the phone screen at the craft. It turned so that it was sideways on, a panel on its flank shimmered and a small hole opened and out from it zipped dozens of little drones. Her eyes widened at William. He cut a quick glance over his shoulder.

“Correction,” he said slowly. “The ship is moving. What looks to be drones are starting to emerge. They are approaching the wharf. They are… What are they doing?”

The drones were stopping before people, a light emerging and scanning them. They flitted from one person to the next, scanning and scanning, like they were looking for something or someone. 

“They don’t yet appear to be harming anyone. Again: people are advised to avoid the area.”

One of the drones, finished with it’s scanning, started beeping wildly. The man in front tried to turn and run but two cords shot out from the drones a seized him. The man shimmered, almost a trick of the light, but then his image inducer failed and suddenly it wasn’t a human standing before the drone but an alien]. The drone buzzed and threw him backwards. Screeching the he flailed wildly, clearing the railing in a high arc and plummeting down towards the water.

“Ah, crap!” Kara killed the live feed and shoved the phone against William’s chest. He clasped his hands around it, stared wide eyed as the drones began tossing people over the railing and into the water. “We need to help those people!”

“Kara, we are observers. It is our job to accurately assess the situation and report it.”

“What for clicks?”

“For the truth!” He gripped her arms like he was going to shake her.

“That’s not more important than stopping someone from getting hurt.” She brushed his arms off of her and stepped back, horrified at the wild look in his eyes. Her own phone started buzzing and she grabbed it, Alex’s face lighting up on the screen “Alex!”

_“Now would be a great time for Supergirl to make an appearance.”_

“Not disagreeing with you but there’s a small probl- wait - _William!_ ”

He had turned and was dashing off towards the drones, phone in his hand, like he had a death wish.

“A minor alien invasion is not worth getting yourself killed over!” She yelled after him. William clearly didn’t hear her, his phone on front of him recording what was happening. “Darn. Okay, give me a second and Supergirl will take care of this.”

_“What do you want us to do?”_

“Crowd control. Keep the people safe.” Kara was already moving, phone back in her pocket, and was whipping off her glasses. She sped round a building and when she emerged she was in full Supersuit and in the air. She pressed her finger to her ear piece.

“Alex, you there?”

_“Yeah. Enroute. Brainy should reach you first.”_

“Alright.” Kara set about rescuing the people, letting them cling to her arm as she hoisted them from the water and deposited them safely back on the wharf. She managed to fish most of them out before the drones even noticed what she was doing. 

One flitted over, a round ocular implement whirring like an automated camera lens as it inspected her. She spun in the air only to be greeted by another drone. There were still a couple of people struggling in the water, she flew down, past the two drones only to feel something snag her arm and jerk her back. A long metal cord as thick as her wrist had been fired out from one of the drones, the claw on the end of it gripped her left wrist with surprising force. She yanked her arm, intending to pull the drone towards her, but it held fast, the cable going taught. 

A second cable fired out from a second drone, the claw snatching her right bicep. Kara growled low in her throat. She hadn’t intended to destroy the drones. Had wanted to first ascertain what they wanted before she went on the attack, but they were hitting the point where she was about to burn them out of the sky.

A third drone hovered before her, it’s optical lens whirring. A light flashed in Kara’s eye, bright enough to leave her blinking away spots. A series of beeps emitted from the drone followed by some clicks that were answered by the two drones restraining her.

“Kryptonian…” the drone before her burred out in a mechanical voice.

That wasn’t good. 

The drones released her and flew back up to the ship, the others following suit, giving up on scanning the panicking crowd and returning to the main ship. 

Kara grabbed the last couple of struggling people from the water and returned them safely to dry land. William was still on the waterfront, standing on the recently erected stage with his phone out, filming.

Kara flew up to the space craft and hovered before it, hands on hip, her cape billowing, as she stared it down. The fact that the drones had stopped their scanning once they’d ascertained that she was Kryptonian meant that she was the one they were looking for. If she could keep the drones and the ship’s occupant’s focus on her then that would better protect the people below. The drones slowly circled the ship, on alert.

“I don’t know who you are or why you’re here, but you’re causing a scene so I’m gonna need you to step out and talk to me so we can sort this out.” She was giving them a chance, an opportunity to prove that they meant no harm, and that this was all just a misunderstanding. Better to solve the problem with words than violence. However, if they failed to emerge from their ship and parley with her like a rational being, then she would absolutely punch their ship out of the sky.

The drones quivered, tiny hulls trembling almost in excitement. Maybe they were an advanced AI? Brainy would be able to tell her when he finally got here.

The ship hissed loudly, the sound of pressure releasing. At once, from all side, thick gas billowed out from unseen ports. With excited chittering beeps the drones flashed coloured lights on the gas, flickering through the whole spectrum. The sounds from them morphed, slowly switching from beeps and clicks to sweeping synths.

 _Is that music?_ Kara’s day was getting weirder by the second. Before she could properly address that though a voice boomed out from the ship.

**_“Having travelled across the galaxy - facing untold dangers - our hero finally finds his one… true… love!”_ **

“Oh no…” Kara’s stomach sank all the way down to her boots.

From the billowing smoke emerged a figure, he was lifted up and out of the ship on a steadily rising platform. He was crouched down on one knee, his head bowed and pressed to the knuckles of his fist. Once clear of the colourful cloud he unfurled his body, stretching out his arms and flexing them back in, making his pecks and biceps dance. Kara slapped a hand over her mouth and looked away, desperately trying not to choke on her own embarrassment. She wanted to leave. To just dive down into the ocean, sit at the bottom of it and scream. He was barely wearing any clothes! A pair of knee high boots, vambraces over his forearms, a long transparent duster coat and, worst of all, leather underwear. That was it. How was this even her life?

“Supergirl! I have travelled far to find you!” He bellowed, flexing through each syllable. “I am Vartox of Valeron and you!” he pointed at her triumphantly, finger guns going off. “You shall be my mate!”

“What?”

 _“What did he say his name was?”_ Alex asked.

Hadn’t this guy died? He looked nothing like Kara remembered. His thick brown hair was brushed back revealing a high broad forehead, he had a handlebar moustache that wouldn’t be out of place in a seventies porno, and beneath his coat every inch of his body was covered in course hair. 

Wouldn’t his hair get stuck to the coat? Why had Kara thought that? It would pull the hairs out, it would be so uncomfortable. She needed to stop thinking.

He ran his fingers through his hair and dropped the hand to his hip, smirking as he continued to point at her, his hips twitching to the beat of the music.

“Supergirl, saviour to my people!” His lips pulled back into a feral grin as he stepped forward, walking confidently along the length of his ship, his hips swaying in an almost feminine manner. He stepped off of the edge of the ship and, just as it looked like he was about to fall, two drones zipped over and he stepped onto them. Slowly the drones floated him towards her. He flung his hands out and wiggled his fingers in a come hither motion that immediately made Kara want to crawl out of her own skin. “My people face the end, our women are barren, my kind doomed to wither away, to waste!” He clenched his fist and drew it towards his chest, his face twisted in anguish. “But I have found the way to save us - you! Only you can aid me in saving Valeron!”

“Uh… sure? I guess.” Kara scratched her head. There was a whole lot going on here and it was difficult to take in, with the lights and the music, the humming buzz of the drones, the gasps and shrieks of the people below, and the way that he was slowly moving closer to her even though he was already way too close. The fact he was wearing a banana hammock and she really didn’t want to look but it was like watching a car crash and her eyes were continually being drawn to the horror show going on down there. “Can we, can we maybe turn the music down?”

“Oh, of course!” He clapped his hands together twice and the music cut off, and, thankfully, without the musical accompaniment his hips stopped twitching. 

“So, uh, Vartox is it?” He nodded at her. “Right. Well, I knew a Vartox of Valeron -”

“We’ve met before?” He bellowed clasping his hands sensationally to his chest. “Impossible! I would remember such beauty-”

“And I’m pretty confident you looked nothing like this.”

“-such grace-”

“And you kinda died.”

“-Such sex appeal!” He rumbled from deep within his chest, the words sounding like they’d been drawn up from his crotch and through his whole body before escaping his mouth.

“What?” She had to have heard that wrong.

 _“What is this guy on?”_ Alex said in Kara’s ear. She sounded just as revolted as Kara felt. _“Guess on this Earth you didn’t fight him.”_

“What?” But that had been her first fight - her first big win! She looked over at this new Vartox; how did that big mean guy with the axe turn into the hairy peacock preening in front of her. She pinched the bridge of her nose. “Okay, Vartox, first of all I’m going to need you to stop it with the commentary.”

“I am only showering you with the compliments you so richly deserve!” He trumpeted, flexing his way through each word.

“Well knock it off. Just stop with the compliments and the posing.” She blew her bangs out of her eyes. “Let’s backtrack to where you said you needed my help. How exactly can I help?”

“With your -” he moved his hands quickly before her, tracing the outline of her body but making it much curvier. “- womanly features.”

“My what now?”

“Your womb.”

 _“Kill him,”_ Alex hissed.

She wasn’t going to kill him but if he came any closer then she might break his arms.

Vartox raised a lecherous eyebrow as he floated even closer. One of drones rose higher than the other and Vartox leaned an arm across his raised knee, smiling confidently at her. Rao, she hoped no one looked up. 

“Your womb of steel,” he clarified in his oiliest voice.

Yep, she was going to break his arms.

“Supergirl what I propose will be beneficial to you as well as to me. You are the last female of your species and I am the greatest male specimen of mine. Our kind are compatible! We should mate.”

She punched him. Her fist connected with the underside of his jaw, clacking his teeth together audibly. The uppercut landed hard enough that he was knocked off the drones and was sent soaring back through the air in a high arc. He bounced off of the ship and fell to the ground with a satisfying meaty splat.

Kara cracked her knuckles. Small mercy that he didn’t know about Argo city. She intended to keep it that way.

Vartox jumped back to his feet. He curled his hand around his jaw. Rubbing it with an almost satisfied grin on his face, he turned his gaze upwards towards her.

“I see that I need to prove myself to you!” He boomed. “Very well! A test of strength! Of speed and wit! Of daring!” He pulled both fists down in front of him like he was in an eighties rock ballad video. “To prove to you why you should accept my mighty seed!”

Vartox put his fingers to his lips and let out a shrill whistle. The drones reacted immediately, startling to attention. Two zipped down to Vartox and he leapt onto them, flying up into the air.

“Try and keep up, Supergirl!” he yelled at her, speeding off. He whipped past the stage, grabbed William by his shirt and hurled him back over his shoulder.

William cart wheeled through the air, screeching. Kara caught him by his ankle, his screams cutting off with a choked _“hrrk!”_. He stared up at her, eyes bulging, somehow still managing to keep a hold of his phone. Ever the reporter, he angled the phone towards her.

“Supergirl?” he swallowed. “Good catch.”

She set him down. Gave him a nod and then sped off, racing to catch up to Vartox. 

Behind her the drones buzzed at they chased after her. She ignored them, intent on stopping Vartox and whatever he had planned.

Vartox swooped low, weaving between the traffic, not at all concerned by the blaring horns, tires screeching or the fact that he was likely to cause an accident. He clipped a car, sent it careering off road and into the side walk towards pedestrians.

With a fresh burst of speed Kara flew down before the car and neatly caught it, only crumpling the hood a little, before it could plough into a group of terrified people. The driver stared white faced at her, clutching the steering wheel in a death grip. 

“Vartox!” She yelled. She leapt back into the air and after him.

“What’s the matter, Supergirl?” Vartox shouted. “Can’t you keep up? There’s no shame in admitting that I’m your better. It is only the natural order.”

Kara was nearly upon him, her hand reaching out to grab him. Something snapped around her ankle and yanked her back. She looked back. The claw from one of the drones was gripping her boot, pulling her back. She seared through the cable with her heat vision and it whipped back smashing into the drone.

Vartox swooped low and grabbed a woman, winked in her terrified face, and then flung her straight up into the air.

“Catch, Supergirl!”

“No!” Kara caught the woman just before she started to fall, but no sooner had she done that Vartox threw another person in the air. Then another. Followed by a car. In a matter seconds the air of National City was filled with dozens of screaming people and vehicles. Kara flitted from one to the next, catching them all and returning them safely to the ground. “Vartox!” She yelled. He was laughing, hand on his stomach, leaning back on his drones and laughing at her as she desperately saved everyone. 

The air boomed around her as she hurtled towards him. She had time to register the widening of his eyes just before she slammed into him. The air whooshed out of him, her shoulder planted firmly into his gut. His elbow connected with the back of her head but she clenched her teeth and ignored it. She had to get him away from the city.

He struck her in the back with his elbow, once, twice, the third hard enough to loosen her grip. She rolled, sent a flurry of punches his way that he managed to dodge or block. He threw a punch, she snapped her head to the side, avoiding it but felt the whip of air as it nearly grazed her. Something hard barrelled into her side - a drone! - and just as she knocked it away he caught her with a backhand across the face. 

“You dare lay your hands on me!” He struck her again, her head snapping back from the force of the blow. He wasn’t laughing anymore. He grabbed her face, his sweaty palm pressing against her cheek as he forced her back. She slammed into the side of a sky scraper, the glass shattering against her back. He tried another punch, but she caught his fist in her hand, tightened her grip till she felt the bones crack. His face contorted with pain. He swung for with his free hand and struck a glancing blow against her cheek. “You dare think it’s ever a woman’s place to lay her hands on a man?”

The first time Kara had fought Vartox she had been painfully inexperienced. Lacking in skill and unsure of her own power. She had been hopelessly outmatched. The only reason she had triumphed was a mixture of luck, Alex, and Vartox’s own arrogance and pride causing him to make mistakes. This Vartox was different. She avoided another punch whilst simultaneously using her heat vision to laser a drone out of the sky. Still arrogant, but as much as he was goading her with his sexist taunts he clearly wasn’t going to make the mistake of underestimating her.

She over reached with her next strike, Vartox neatly leaning back on his drones to avoid her. He grabbed her by the cape and suddenly Kara’s world was spinning. Skyscrapers. The sky. The ground. It flashed past Kara’s eyes as Vartox pivoted in circles winding her up to throw. He hurled her, the force too great for her to immediately correct. She crashed off the corner of a building, mortar and glass exploding form the impact of her body, and kept going, tumbling through the air. The next building she hit was part way through reconstruction, the exposed girders bending and cracking as her near indestructible body collided through them. She finally, managed she get her flight back under control, to halt mid air. 

Above her the half-formed structure groaned, the metal straining under an impact it wasn’t designed to suffer. She looked up just as the top swayed and fell, curving down wards in what seemed like slow motion towards the fleeing people below. She moved round, hands grasping the stronger parts and pushed, slowly steady the building.

She pushed the whole structure back in place, aware that Vartox was watching her. She flew round the building and welded the girders in place, making it as safe as she was able. 

Vartox was fast. The two drones he stood on were surprisingly speedy and agile. She was faster - stronger too- but he didn’t care who he hurt. She couldn’t break the sound barrier within the city, the risk to the citizens was too great. She had to constantly monitor her own strength. Be aware of her surroundings. The fact that she had to constantly think, to moderate her speed and strength, curtail her own power, gave him an advantage. One that she was all too sure he was aware of.

She turned back to face Vartox, fists curled at her sides. He stood with his arms crossed, drones hovering about him, his lip curled into a sneer. For all his preening and prancing he was clearly trained. He anticipated Kara’s attacks, could feint with the best of them, and had formed a plan. 

_“Supergirl, you need to take this fight outside the city limits,”_ Alex said.

“Working on it,” Kara replied. Her eyes buzzed with the after effects of her heat vision. 

_“Brainy and Dreamer have secured one of the drones and Brainy thinks he can find a way from it to shut the others down.”_

“Have you had enough, Supergirl?” Vartox barked. “Are you ready to submit and accept me as your superior?”

“Hardly,” Kara growled. She raced towards Vartox, reengaging him in their fight. 

“You can’t fight me and protect them,” Vartox sneered. 

Behind her something cracked, the terrible sound of metal shearing away and cables snapping and whipping through the air. Kara planted her boot into Vartox’s chest and used him to springboard back towards the sound. The drones had cut away the arm of one of the tower cranes, all one hundred foot of sheer metal falling free. She caught the arm over her shoulders, grunting with the sudden ungainly weight of it. Careful, so careful, she lowered herself and her load to the ground and set it down.

Disorientated, Kara glanced about her. There were too many people. A great swell of a crowd, cameras flashing and news reporters clamouring to get a view of her fight. Behind them were others carrying signs, all riled and jacked up on adrenaline, yelling. She frowned as she took in where she was. The court stood behind the people and with a start she realised that their fight had interrupted Andrea’s hearing.

“What happened to that ground control?” Kara demanded.

_“You have any idea how many miles you’ve travelled from the water front? You’re practically on the other side of the city.”_

The ground rumbled. Kara looked up, Vartox was pushing the building she’d just secured, his drones attacking the weakened points she’d fixed. She fired back up, kicked one of the drones on her way past and sent it sailing off into the distance, rounded the building and put her back to it, pushing back against it. 

“Vartox!” She screamed. The metal at her back was groaning, concrete crumbling and if she wasn’t careful the building would just break around her. “Stop this!”

Below her the crowd was beginning to panic, screaming and fleeing as they finally grasped what was happening. 

Vartox hovered round before her, calm as anything. “Submit to me, Supergirl and I will save these people.”

Several things happened at once. A drone slammed Kara back into the building and she lost her grip. Vartox pulled her back by her hair, spun her round, and slammed her back into the building, taking out the corner girders. Kara kicked him away, caught the building again and halted its descent. It wasn’t enough. From high above her a section gave way and fell, the thick metal and concrete plummeting towards the court house. A thick girder spiralled down like a dart, and Kara was helpless to do anything but watch as it speared through the roof. 

“No!” she shrieked, reaching one hand towards it, knowing there was nothing she could do. A claw snapped around her outstretched wrist and a drone attempted to haul her off of the building. 

The court house crumbled, part of the side wall giving way. There were still people there, news crews boxed in by their own vans. The crowd not moving fast enough. Kara stared in horror at the people, at - 

_Lena!_

She was there amongst the crowd, not running, just standing there, a solitary figure amongst the panicking crowd. Her head was tilted up as she almost calmly watched the building before her collapse, the whole side of it fall towards her.

“No, no!” Kara yanked on the drone, whipped it away, and heaved back on the building. She kicked off it. Knew already that she wasn’t going to make it in time. Another figure, a woman, burst through the crowd towards Lena. Andrea shoved someone out the way, her hand already clasping the medallion round her neck. She collided with Lena, knocking her towards the crumbling wall and into its shadow. Black clouds burst around the pair of them, swallowing them.

Kara just made it under the wall in time for it to hit her back, to use her super breath to blow the last remaining people out of its way as it exploded around her. 

She flicked her cape out scattering the debris, heart in her throat, her blood boiling. Vartox hovered above, cackling. He didn’t care that he had put the people of her city in danger. Her heart was jumping, her pulse firing hot and quick. 

_“Supergirl,”_ Brainy said over the comms. _“We’ve found a way to disable his drones. They are organic AI and controlled through a neuro-link.”_

“What do I need to do?”

_“There will be a cerebral transmitter - likely it is internal. Break that, break the link to the drones.”_

“So I what?”

 _“Hit him really hard!”_ Nia crowed over the link.

“On it,” she growled. 

“Submit, Supergirl!” Vartox crowed. He swept his hand down his body, leering down at her. “Submit and accept your place at my side.”

Kara dropped to her knee, pressed her fist to the ground. She grit her teeth, cast a quick glance to make sure no one was near her, and then kicked off, the concrete cracking beneath her. She broke the sound barrier, heard the boom behind her, saw Vartox flinch, but it was too late. Her fist connected with his jaw, teeth shattering beneath the force. He was sent flying back. She followed and hit him again, and again, her fists striking him repeatedly, knocking him hundreds of feet at a time, back over the city. 

She had to get him out of the city. Her hesitation to use more power had put people in danger. She’d been so afraid of accidentally hurting them herself that she’d allowed Vartox to use them as weapons against her.

No more holding back. 

They reached the city edge, Vartox still reeling from each blow she landed on him. His lip was split, bloody spittle flying as his head snapped back from a particularly vicious jab. She could see the desert now, the space she needed where it would be safe for her to let loose. She landed a blow in his gut doubling him over. The drones on his feet jerked, like they were trying to get away. She grabbed a fist full of his hair and held him in place. A quick burst of freeze breath and the drones - and Vartox’s booted feet - were encased in ice. She seized his coat in one hand, the other clawed across his face until she had a fistful of facial hair, and she spun, winding him up like she was at the Olympics going for gold in the hammer throw, and she hurled him clean across the desert.

She sped after him. He hit the ground, dust and sand exploding up around him. Kara landed a half-second later, one foot on the ground, the other she planted firmly in his sternum and kicked him. He flew back, bounced off of the ground like a stone skipping across a lake. Her kick sent him a good mile and a half across the desert floor before he rolled to a stop. 

Vartox pushed himself up, face twisted in anger. He put his fingers to his lips and blew a shrill whistle, louder than anything a human could ever hope to produce, loud enough that Kara winced.

She expected the drones, had already half-turned to meet them. She was wrong.

The boom of Vartox’s ship appearing suddenly overhead and bearing down on her was loud enough to cause the ground to ripple. The clap of air whipped her hair and cape back. She could only hope that its journey over the city hadn’t caused much damage.

It went straight for her. The nose angling down, its weapons zeroed in on her. She flew up to meet it, eyes blazing with heat vision. It fired, twin laser beams directly at her. She met them with her heat vision, screamed as she cut through his inferior weapons. The guns at the front of the ship exploded under her onslaught. She didn’t let up. She seared a line beneath the hull and just before it could collide with her she used the air ripple to spin, rammed her hand through the line she had scored in the metal. She gripped the ship, metal giving way under the strength of her fingers and swung the ship round.

Vartox was back in the air, wobbling on one drone. Kara swung the ship like a baseball bat and - _thunk_ \- she swatted him clean out of the air. 

“Home run.” She grinned to herself. Still holding the ship by it’s ruined hull she followed after him, caught up just in time to see him crash back down to earth several miles away. 

With shaky arms, Vartox dragged himself out from the crater his body had made upon impact. His body was shaking, almost violently, as he pushed himself to his knees at the edge of the crater, spitting blood and dust.

Kara glared down at him and felt nothing but rage. She wound her arm back, like she was letting loose the first pitch of the season, and javelined his ship into the ground next to him. He toppled back over onto his ass with a yell of alarm, enveloped in a cloud of dust and swirling sand.

She lowered herself closer to the ground, but maintained her distance, hovering above him. Her fist clenched and eyes glowing, tingling with her barely suppressed rage. Her cape snapped in the wind.

“Enough.. Enough…” Vartox held up his hand. He coughed, wiped his forearm across his mouth smearing spittle and blood across his face. “Enough Supergirl.”

“Enough?” Her words trembled with her anger. “You have put the people of this planet, people I have sworn to protect, in danger. You’ve hurt them!”

He looked genuinely confused as though she was speaking a language he couldn’t possibly understand. He cast his eyes about him, looking at the vast emptiness of the desert for some sort of support.

“Humans, only humans,” he wheezed. He stared up at her, pleading, bewildered. “They’re barely better than beasts, so primitive, so backwards.”

“These are my people. You don’t get to speak of them.” She floated closer, light leaking from her eyes. She knew exactly how she’d look. Floating above him, barely holding back on her real power. The way her eyes burned the veins in her face would look like scores of lightning beneath her skin. She could be scary when she wanted to be. When she needed to be. He was casual cruelty made flesh and she wanted him to be afraid. Afraid to ever lift his hand against another again. Afraid to ever even think of any sentient creature in such a disparaging manner again. “You came here, you tried to forcibly take me, and you purposefully endangered people just to get my attention.” She burned a line in the sand before him, hot enough that glass glittered and glowed in its aftermath. Vartox skittered back on his ass, hands and feet clawing at the dirt. “Congratulations. You have my full attention.”

“I just… I just…” 

“You just what?” She grit out. “Thought that you could invade my home, attack my people, that you could just use me? You put the people of my city in danger.”

The people she had sworn to protect. How many had been hurt by his actions? She saw in her mind the panic, reheard the screams as his drones attacked, as rubble fell about them. She saw the figure of Lena standing in the growing shadow of the wall falling towards her. Calmly looking up at it. Not even trying to run. Kara’s blood ran suddenly cold. Her anger turning into something different, ice in her veins as dread curled up throat thick and choking.

Kara dragged in a ragged breath. She had sworn she would protect the people of this planet. But she had made a personal promise to Lena.

Vartox pushed himself up onto his knees and scrabbled around pathetically in the dirt. It might be a ruse, a means to draw her closer so he could attack her again. Kara refused to play his game. She hovered out of his reach, eyes still burning. If he tried anything, if he even so much as sneezed in her direction, she was going to pummel him into the sediment.

“My people are dying,” he rasped, his words spoken to the ground. “I have to save them.”

“That’s not an excuse for what you’ve done. You don’t get to treat people the way you’ve treat me. You don’t have free reign to endanger lives for your own personal satisfaction.”

He collapsed into the dirt, head bowed and fingers grasping rivets into the sand. “I can’t save Valeron alone.”

“If you wanted my help you should have just asked.”

“Asked? You can’t just ask for help,” he said miserably. He turned his head up towards her, confusion etched into his dirty sweat stained face. One of the bars of his moustache was missing and it made him look all the more ridiculous and pitiful. 

“Help is always there for those who ask.” She let the light leak from her eyes. _Hope, help and compassion for all,_ even for him, even for those that all too often seemingly didn’t deserve it. He was contemptible, but if Valeron was truly dying and if it was in her power to help then how could she turn her back? She knew what it was to lose everything, for you whole world to die. She couldn’t let his actions speak for an entire people. “Let’s try this - wait!”

She spun round, feeling the change in air pressure.

 _“Supergirl incoming!”_ Brainy yelled over the comms.

Above her the air rippled and a sleek black craft appeared, larger than Vartox’s and hovering, the side emblazoned with the DEO logo.

**_“Supergirl stand down.”_ **

“What the hell?” She gasped as fully armed tactical kitted out agents repelled down from the ship.

“What is the meaning of this?” Vartox staggered to his feet, but just as he straightened up he was knocked backwards by an energy blast. Kara spun, watched him as he tumbled down into the crater, writhing, trapped beneath an energy net.

“You heard the big ship in the sky, stand down, Supergirl.”

Kara turned towards the voice. From between the black clad agents a woman walked out, dressed in a suit with a tan trench coat over it despite the heat. She pulled a cigarette from her where she had it tucked behind her ear and slipped it between her lips. Kara lowered herself towards the ground and walked to meet the woman. Her eyes widened as she recognised her.

“I know you,” she said.

“I should hope so we’ve worked together enough times,” the woman replied, the unlit cigarette bobbing on painted lips. “But maybe all us humans look the same to you.”

“Agent Chase.” The memory of the woman before her tickled at Kara’s brain. Cameron Chase had been an FBI agent specialising in super villains, but that had been back on the old Earth. On this newly formed Earth it appeared she was a DEO agent.

“Director, actually,” Chase corrected. “Got a nice promotion following the destruction of the National City facility. A destruction that was well within your capabilities to prevent, I might add.”

Kara clenched her jaw, refusing to bite that bait. “What are you doing here?”

“So hostile.” Chase’s lips twitched in the barest semblance of a crooked smile. “My job. A hostile alien attacked and that falls under the purvey of the DEO. We’re taking him in.”

Vartox let out an indignant squawk as agents wrestled him into power dampening cuffs. Kara crossed her arms and tried to stare Chase down. Chase gazed back, not at all bothered by Supergirl’s attempts. 

“Did you have plans for him?” Chase questioned. “He doesn’t seem your type but I guess I wouldn’t know. I can’t let you whisk him off to your little Kryptonian fortress. He’s committed crimes against Earth and has to answer for them. You know that.”

She did. That was the worst part. She was standing on the outside and watching the DEO work, and from this vantage point she didn’t like what she saw. Worse was that chase was right. Vartox had committed crimes and he was too dangerous to let loose. He had no regard for human life. What would Kara do with him? Without the DEO at her back she had no prison cells, no jurisdiction.

“Glare all you want Supergirl, it was your choice to cease working with us.” Chase half-turned and watched as her agents bundled Vartox into a secure cell and was hoisted up onto the jet. “Frankly it’s only because of your years of service that I don’t have a warrant out for your arrest.”

“What? I haven’t done anything.”

“Apart from your being a vigilante, you mean?” Chase smirked at her. “You’re an illegal alien. Quite literally at that. You’re unregistered, unknown, and, let’s face it, likely a tax dodger. It’s only due to the Luthor’s influence that you were ever able to escape having your identity registered in government records.”

There were Lex’s fingers in the pie again. Had he used his knowledge of her identity to leverage her support? Had the Supergirl of this earth been kept on a chain? 

“I’m glad we’re finally getting the chance to talk. You’re a difficult woman to track down, not like I just have a big ol’ light I can shine in the sky and you appear.” Even though she was considerably shorter than Kara, Director Chase had enough presence to appear taller, to take up room with the sheer force of her being. 

“What did you want to discuss?” Kara asked tersely.

“I just wanted to relay my admiration for your efforts. This planet owes you a great debt, Supergirl.” She sounded unimpressed, bordering on sarcastic. Like Kara saving the earth was of so little consequence that it deserved no fanfare. It wasn’t as though Kara was Supergirl for the accolades, so Chase’s tone shouldn’t bother her, but they felt like needles under her skin. She was being goaded. “We’ll no doubt cross paths again and I want you to understand that I won’t stand for you getting in the DEO’s way. You do your thing, we’ll do our legal thing. It’s out of respect that I’m letting you and your little merry band of misfits go about their business. I’m not saying I’ll turn a blind eye, I’ll be watching, but I won’t interfere unless you give me a reason to.”

“This is starting to sound like a threat, Director,” Kara said. Chase knowing about Brainy, Nia and Alex wasn’t ideal. J’onn and M’gann were out of her reach but she could make life very difficult for her other friends. “I don’t take well to threats.”

“No threat. Just honesty.” Chase turned, hands on her hip, to watch as her Agents swept the area. They began setting up lines around the crumpled ruin of Vartox’s ship. “I imagine you’ve got other things to attend to.”

It was a dismissal and Kara was struck with the urge to be petty and hang around, to loom over the DEO’s presence and let them know that they might be watching her but she was watching right back. But this wasn’t the moment to antagonise the new Director. She turned to Chase and smiled, big and bright, and held out her hand.

“I look forward to working with you, Director Chase.”

Chase’s eyes widened a fraction. Her eyes flickered down to Kara’s outstretched hand. Her heart rate had ticked up a notch, not as cool and collected as she was pretending to be. Slowly she took Kara’s hand and gave it a firm squeeze. Kara could feel the tension in Chase’s arm, like she was anticipating Kara crushing her hand or suddenly flinging her up into the lower atmosphere. 

“Likewise, Supergirl.”

“Congratulations on the promotion.” Kara floated up, hovered a couple of feet above Chase, a little show boaty but it didn’t hurt to remind Chase of some of her powers. 

“Hey, uh, Supergirl, before you go, you think you could?” Chase tapped the unlit end of the cigarette dangling from her lips.

“Smoking is bad for you, Director,” she replied earnestly.  
Kara fired off up into the sky, faster than necessary, knowing that she’ll have likely rocked Chase back on her feet.

/\/\/\/\

**  
_[Kara]_   
** _SOS_

 ** _[Kara]_** SOS just for u

 ** _[Kara]_** _not a gun type SOS don’t bring weapons!!!!_

Kara glanced down at her phone; Alex hadn’t replied to her texts but Kara knew she was on her way. 

Dusk had settled over the city. Kara chewed her lip as she stared out of her windows and listened to the sounds of her city. It wasn’t as soothing as she’d like it to be. A group of friends were loudly playing a video game in the building across from her, a cat was yowling in an alley, a girl was being consoled by her friends following a break up. Kara closed her eyes and drew in a breath and listened.

Parents were getting their young children ready for bed. Dog walkers were out. A group of skaters were in the park celebrating someone landing a jump. Traffic blared. Police had cordoned off the court house and were directing people away from it. Kara frowned and concentrated. 

The DEO desert facility was still operational but she couldn’t hear anything. It was silence there. The tremors of the earth and the skittering of sand across the desert floor, and the grit in the air. If she listened hard enough she could hear the shift of the earth, could hear the creak of it spinning and the subtle shift of plates. She couldn’t hear anything that gave way that there was a facility beneath the sand, one where hundreds of people worked and a whole prison complex with dozens of alien criminals were incarcerated. There was nothing. 

She opened her eyes and stepped back from the window. Did the DEO know her identity? The Luthor’s certainly did but that didn’t mean that they had shared it with the regular DEO staff. It was likely that Director Chase knew and that was going to be a problem. Did they view her as a threat that needed to be neutralised? Chase had looked less than impressed to see her. If they knew her identity did they also know Nia and Brainy’s?

She looked westward, narrowed her eyes and listened. She shouldn’t, it was an invasion of privacy but she needed to know that Lena was alright so she listened. Her penthouse was silent; the building itself hummed with its usual noise, the doorman chuckling to himself, other inhabitants going about their evening, but there was nothing from Lena’s penthouse. Maybe she wasn’t there? She might be at Andrea’s. That would make sense. Kara picked her phone up and chewed on her lip harder. It wouldn’t be difficult to just send Lena a text and find out. It would be the normal thing to do, the kind of thing a friend would and should do. 

Kara brought up the text chat she had with Lena and reread the last texts from Lena. They had been sent the day after Kara had walked out form Lena’s lab. Kara had ignored them. 

**_[Lena]_** _Can we talk?_

 ** _[Lena]_** _Please?_

Kara had said she had nothing to say to Lena and she had meant it. In that moment she had wanted nothing more than to say her piece and walk away but now she realised that it wasn’t that she didn’t have anything to say, but that she didn’t know what it was she wanted to say. She’d let her anger get the better of her. Lena had been right; it had been satisfying in the moment but now, once she’d cooled down, all she was left with was remorse. A sick twisting feeling in the pit of her stomach. It wasn’t that she hadn’t spoken the truth, and it wasn't that she didn’t think she was wrong to tell Lena what she thought, but that it had come out all wrong. They needed to talk. Actually sit down and talk and not let anger get in the way of saying the things they needed to say; that Kara needed to say. 

She licked her lips, swiping her tongue across where she’d worried at them, and started to type out a message. She only got two words in before she was deleting and trying again. How hard was it just to ask: _“are you okay?”_

She sighed in annoyance as she tossed her phone down on the table. She’d deal with that later when she had more energy. One problem at a time. 

Footsteps echoed their way along the hallway outside her apartment; by the sound of the boot, the weight and gait of the walk she knew it was Alex. They stopped just outside her door and the rattle of keys in the lock preceded the door opening and Alex walking through, motorcycle helmet in hand. She reached for the light switch and flicked it on.

“Jesus, Kara, why are you standing around in the dark?” Alex threw her a glare before kicking the door closed behind her. She crossed the space to the kitchen table where she dropped her helmet and keys. She shrugged out of her jacket and draped it over the back of a chair before turning to Kara, her brow furrowed in concern. “What is it? What's wrong?”

“The DEO still exists.”

Alex’s frown morphed from concerned to confused. “Yes? Didn’t we already know or at least guess that? We knew the desert facility wasn’t destroyed so it makes sense that it still exists in some form.”

“Did you know that it’s a worldwide organisation with facilities set up around the globe?”

“No, I didn’t know that.” Alex crossed her arms, going on the defence at Kara’s accusatory tone. “I guess when they said ‘director’ that I was just in charge of the National City facilities. Wow, now I’m wondering if there were other US facilities. Not that Lex would have shared that information with me.”

Kara walked from the window over to join Alex. “After I defeated Vartox the DEO arrived to take him in.”

“That is their job. Can’t say I see the problem there.”

“Cameron Chase is the director now.”

Alex paused, her brow furrowing. “Why is that name familiar?” 

“She was the FBI agent that investigated Toyman back on the old earth.”

“Good for her on the promotion.” Alex headed into the kitchen and yanked the fridge door open, grabbed a beer, closed the fridge door with a bit too much force, and crossed the apartment so she could fall back down onto the couch. She let out a long, tired groan, and rubbed the heel of her hand into her eye. She set the unopened bottle down and began undoing the zips on her boots. “I’m not seeing the problem here. Lex is dead, the DEO isn’t his toy box anymore, and it looks to function much the same as it did before.”

What was the problem? Kara had never had an issue with the DEO before, but now she hated that it existed, that it was out there making decisions for aliens. Was it just that she wasn’t part of that decision making Process? Was it arrogance that drove this feeling? It wasn’t as though she’d ever taken all that much part in any decision regarding those she brought in. She just caught the bad guys and let the DEO sort out the rest. But she’d at least felt like she’d had a voice, that she could have spoken up if she’d wanted to and when J’onn or Alex had been in charge then she knew she’d have been listened to.

But she hadn’t spoken up. She’d remained silent. She had abdicated whatever responsibility she had to those she apprehended.

“I just think,” she started unsure of where she was going with this. “I think that we should be careful with how we interact with the DEO. It’s not our organisation anymore. This is a new earth and the DEO is a completely different with a different mission. It’s not something that I want any part of and I don’t want to be handing aliens over to it. Not if I can help it.”

“What’s brought this on?” Alex popped the top off her beer and took a swig. She tossed the cap down on the table where it skittered across the top and nearly fell off the other side.

Kara sat down next to Alex, turned towards her, back straight, all business. This was going to be a tough conversation but she could do this. “How much do you remember of Crisis?”

Alex looked surprised, probably at the change in subject. Her brows rose, wrinkling her forehead. “Not a lot. I was - I remember boarding the ships, holding Kelly’s hand, and uh… That’s it. My next memory is standing in your apartment with J’onn after he restored my memories. “

“You don’t remember the anti-matter wave?” Kara asked quiet and afraid. 

“I remember that it was heading towards Earth, that it took out Argo but that’s it.” She closed her eyes, lips thinning as she thought. “My last memory is being on the ship next to Kelly and holding her hand. I was worried but not scared.”

Kara pulled her leg up crossing it across her knee and picked at her sock. One of threads was loose; she wound it round her finger, wrapping it tighter and tighter around the first joint of her finger. 

“I lost everyone,” she said quietly. “Again. Argo was destroyed. Kal and Lois and Jon died. You were gone. Everyone was wiped out and I was left alone and everyone was looking to me to make them feel better, looking at me like I had any answers. But I didn’t.” She looked up at Alex, her throat tightening as tears stung at her eyes. “I was supposed to be the Paragon of Hope and I had never felt more hopeless in my entire life.”

Alex set her beer down on the table and swivelled towards Kara, pulling both her feet up onto the couch and tucking them beneath her. She shuffled close to Kara and laid her hand gently on Kara’s knee. She probably hadn’t been expecting such a heavy topic of conversation, but she was Alex and endlessly supportive so she took it in stride. There were universal constants that Kara was sure of, that no matter how bent out of shape reality got would hold true, and Alex being there for her was one of them. 

That sent a ripple of pain across Kara’s heart. She had failed to protect Alex during Crisis. 

“We never did talk about Crisis and what happened did we? We were all so busy with Lex and stopping whatever it was he was up to.”

Kara tugged on the thread and it snapped. She unwound it from her finger and rolled it into a ball, flicking it away. It felt stupid to grieve so many months after, to have held onto and ignored her hurt, and only now for it catch up to her. But here she was. Throat burning and eyes stinging, her lip wobbling as she desperately fought back tears.

“Kara, hey,” Alex said softly. She put her fingers to Kara’s chin and gently tipped her head up, meeting her eyes. “Talk to me. What’s going on?”

“Everything is different. It’s hard to think that we won when everything about this Earth is so different. Sure there are things that I like; y’know, having Kate and Barry close by is great but then Lex is a hero on this Earth. He was probably the worst person to ever exist and the entire planet is convinced that he is this sacrificial hero who saved all their lives. Every day I have to see his face sneering at me. It’s like he won.”

“Alright, well, we can look into him again. Compile evidence and release it, publish an article like you did last time and reveal the truth about who he was.”

Kara shook her head slowly, sniffing. There was visible strain around Alex’s eyes and mouth, a lingering tension that hadn’t quite lessoned since their battle against Leviathan, but beneath that there was nothing but concern there. She rubbed Kara’s knee in slow, soothing motions.

“This isn’t unfixable. We just add it to the list of things we need to take care of, okay?” she smiled encouragingly at Kara. “We were going to investigate Lillian at some point we might as well get both her and Lex at the same time.”

“I know.” Kara sniffed again. 

“What brought this on?”

“I dunno, a lot of things. I think it all just caught up with me.” She wiped her eyes with the back of hand, feeling the urge to sniffle again. “Recently it’s like the universe is just intent on reminding me that this isn’t our Earth.”

“I mean, I get it. It’s all a little messed up.” Alex grabbed her beer and took a long drink. “Even after being to another Earth I just -” she flicked her fingers out from her head and made a small ‘boom’ noise. “Right?”

“Right.” Kara wiped her eyes again, if she wiped them enough maybe they’d stop leaking. “I talked to Lena about it. About Crisis and what happened.”

Alex’s expression turned stony. “Really?”

Kara could see the gears turning in Alex’s head, the way her defences were rearing up. She was attempting to join the dots and getting the picture completely wrong. Given a moment more she’d be in full blown protective big sister mode.

“Yeah. She brought it up, it’s not like I went to her and started the conversation.”

“Good.”

“Good?” Where had this animosity towards Lena come from? It was getting exhausting keeping up with Alex and ever changing position on Lena. 

Alex seemed to sense Kara’s tired frustration. She held up her hand in a placating gesture.

“Before you start I’m not saying we should be dragging Lena to prison or firing up the Phantom Zone projector, I just think we should be more careful.” Alex’s eyes were hard, her gaze flinty and unmoving as she kept her gaze locked on Kara. “We can’t just pretend that everything is all right with Lena. Trust is earned. She keeps working with us, it all goes well, then fantastic! She joins the team and all is well, but Kara. I think that you need to temper that expectation, that you need accept that Lena isn’t who you thought she was. That she’s -”

“A Luthor?” Kara suggested angrily. 

“She’s always been that,” Alex said tiredly. She leaned back against the couch, her feet slipping to the floor as she stared up at the ceiling. She looked miserable. Her eyes tight with dark circles beneath them, and Kara realised that Alex didn’t look strained from a left over battle fatigue but utterly exhausted. She sunk further down into the couch like the weight she was carrying was suddenly too much for her to lift. She let out a miserable little sigh. “She was my friend too,” she said quietly.

“I know.” Kara swallowed against the lump in her throat. But it wasn’t the same. Alex might mourn for her friendship with Lena, but their connection was that they shared Kara. All their affection for one another had been born from and carried by that fact. Alex had lost a friend but Kara felt the wound where Lena had been cut from her life so much deeper. Her chest felt tight again, like it was sucking itself in, her little personal black hole that she risked collapsing into. 

She nudged Alex’s thigh with her foot and Alex turned to her, looking just as lost and heartbroken as Kara felt. She held Kara’s gaze for a beat and then rolled her eyes.

“Fine. What did our favourite evil genius have to say?”

Kara licked her lips. It did nothing to moisten her lips; her mouth and throat were as dry as the desert. “She remembers.”

“Before Crisis? I already knew that.”

“She remembers the anti-matter wave that killed everyone. She remembers dying.”

Alex absorbed the information with a slow nod. “Okay, that’s… unpleasant. Sucks to be her. How come she kept her memories?” She asked, turning back towards Kara with a thoughtful frown.

“Lex made a deal with the Monitor that Lena would survive with her memories intact. I don’t get why, you’d think that he’d want her dead after what she did to him, but he wanted her alive.”

“I get why he wanted her alive,” Alex said darkly. She snorted at Kara’s confused expression. “To mess with you. _‘Haha, Supergirl, now your best friend is working with me!’_ He was so pathetic and childish.”

Kara stared at Alex and not just because of her utterly awful impression of Lex but also because she had distilled Kal’s greatest foe, a man who might have been one of the smartest humans to ever exist, whose Machiavellian schemes had led them in endless circles and who, despite being dead, might have still somehow have beaten them, into a petty school yard bully. Like there was nothing more to Lex’s motivation than to put a thumb tack on Kara’s chair.

Kara let out a low whistle. “I don’t even know how to process that. Okay, um.” Kara cleared her throat. “Lena thinks that Earth Prime is its own separate Earth, that each individual on Prime is new and has lived their lives concurrent with the other Earth’s. She thinks that there was a Prime Earth Lena who lived a whole life that was separate to her’s and that when Lex’s deal went into effect she was-” Kara paused, running out of breath. She took a moment to collect her thoughts, trying not to ramble or get mixed up. She didn’t mean for it to be a dramatic pause but Alex clearly took it that way. She leaned in, eyes wide as she waited for Kara to continue. “Killed. Replaced. That the original Lena of this Earth was overwritten with our Lena.”

Alex nodded, long and slow, her eyes as wide as saucers. “I’d forgotten what a barrel of laughs Lena can be. Tell me, how did the Paragon of Hope become best friends with the Multiverse’s most cynical woman?” She shifted closer to Kara, placed her hand back on Kara’s knee. “Is that what you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you’re thinking about it. You’re driving yourself crazy thinking about it.” Alex sounded mad, her protective side rearing up again. Reacting like Kara driving herself nuts thinking about this was all part of Lena’s evil plan. “I can see it all up here.” She waved her finger in Kara’s face pointing out exactly where she could see the crazy leaking out of her.

“Things are different,” Kara tried. She could hear the plaintive whine in her own tone, but Alex wasn’t listening, was misunderstanding what Kara was trying to tell her. “I don’t have any memories of this Earth. The Supergirl here, who was happily working with Lex, she’s a stranger to me.”

“So, what, you think that makes Lena right?”

Kara exhaled heavily, trying to push out the tightness in her chest. Alex was watching her, her frustration and worry written all over her face.

It wasn’t that Kara wanted Lena to be right, truthfully, she had never wanted Lena to be more wrong. Because if Lena was right then that meant that Alex - _her Alex_ \- had died. That she was dead and gone. That the woman sitting before her - worry etched on her familiar features - was a stranger with her sister’s memories pasted over her own. Even thinking about it made Kara’s chest constrict painfully. Pushed all the air out of her lungs and squeezed her heart. Memories made a person, didn’t they? But even if they did there would be differences, physical changes from a life altered in minor and catastrophically huge ways. Did this Alex’s arm ache when it rained? Did her right knee click when she crouched down? If Kara looked would she be able to see the healed bones that she remembered breaking?

She was too much of a coward to ask.

“Kara, seriously, you will drive yourself insane thinking about this.”

“I know, I know, it’s just that fighting Vartox reminded me that things are different. I mean, I never fought him? He was the first bad guy I took down.” She scrubbed her hand across her eyes, feeling stupid for crying and annoyed that Alex wasn’t getting it. “Who did I fight?”

“I can get Brainy to hack the DEO and look through their files to find out.”

“That’s not the point!” Kara cried. Alex held her hands up, taken aback by Kara’s outburst. “I mean it is but it isn’t.” She flailed not knowing how to make Alex understand. “William is different.”

Confusion flashed briefly across Alex’s face followed by a knowing look and smile. She laughed softly. “Ah, now I think I see where this is going. Okay, tell me how William is different.”

“He’s not a dick.”

Alex blinked. “I’m sorry did you just say dick?”

“I did.” Kara nodded emphatically. She could use bad words when the situation called for it.

“Huh. And he was a dick? Before?” Alex asked slowly.

“Yes. When we first started dating I was waiting for everyone at Catco to hate me.”

“Why would they hate you?”

“Because as part of his undercover identity he was married and everyone at work thought he had a wife. He even had a wedding ring. But since Crisis he doesn’t have a ring and no one has accused me of being the other woman.”

“I’m so confused right now,” Alex muttered. She pinched the bridge of her nose. “Kara! That is a good thing!”

“Sure, you’d think so, right? But it means that this William isn’t the one I knew before. He’s a whole new William, fresh out the box! I don’t know if he’s this earth’s William. If Earth 38’s William is dead, or maybe if all the William Dey’s that were left across the Multiverse got smooshed together to create a single William who exists on this earth! My head hurts thinking about it all!”

“Yeah, I can see how that would give you a headache.” Alex rubbed her hands along her jeans. She snatched up her bottle of beer and took a long drink from it. She pushed herself up from the couch, her hands together like she was praying, fingertips pressed to her lips. She started pacing the apartment. Kara had expected more confusion from Alex, or, if she had suddenly understood, to be sympathetic or annoyed. But Alex looked half a step away from having a panic attack. Her heart rate had skyrocketed, her breaths came out in harsh pants. “I have a confession,” she said quickly.

“What is it?”

“I - I’ve been thinking about this too and I did something I shouldn’t have done.”

“Alex?” Kara leaned forward, eyes following Alex as she made sharp pivots, stalking back and forth across Kara’s apartment.

“Because of the doppelgangers, those left over people from the other earths. I got to thinking about how different that other Winn was.” She stopped walking and turned to Kara. She shook out hers hands. “I looked up Maggie,” she confessed.

“What?” Kara breathed. “Why?”

“Because I had to know. I had to know that there was a Maggie on this earth. That even if-” She cut off, sucked in a breath, hands and voice shaking. “Even if she didn’t make it through Crisis that there was still a version of her in the universe.”

“Oh, Alex.”

“I know.”

“And?”

“There is. She lives in Metropolis.” Alex gulped wetly. She lowered herself back down to the couch and turned to Kara, tears glimmering in her eyes, her smile strained. “She’s married. Her wife is a reporter for the Daily Planet and they’ve been together for a few years. She’s captain of the special crimes unit. She, Jesus Kara, she has a daughter.”

Kara’s heart broke for Alex. For what she had lost and had to give up. For how unfair life was. For the ways that the universe was so cruel and to those who least deserved it. 

She took Alex’s hand in her own, held it tight as she fought back a fresh wave of tears. She pushed down her own fear and gripped Alex’s hand, determined to help Alex through this.

Alex smiled at her, a real big bright smile that was a little shaky at the edges. She blinked a couple of times and a couple of tears fell. 

“A beautiful little girl who looks just like her mom. And I thought that I should be mad, I should be heartbroken. But you know what?”

Kara shook her head, her throat too tight to speak.

“I was happy for her. And then I was - _am_ \- so thankful that I have Kelly.”

Kara pulled Alex into a bone squeezing hug, smushing her chin up against the side of Alex’s head, as Alex gripped at her back. 

“Kelly is pretty great,” Kara croaked through her tight burning throat. She sniffed, joining Alex with her little cry. 

Alex pushed her back, eyes bloodshot and cheeks puffy from all the crying. She laughed a little as she rubbed away the tear tracks on her cheeks. “The point I’m trying to make, or at least I think I’m trying to make, is that we will never really know exactly how Crisis worked or fully understand what was lost or gained. That is a balance on some kind of cosmic scale that is far beyond my understanding or yours, and definitely beyond Lena’s, I don’t care how many PhD’s she has.”

Kara laughed.

“Here is what I know. We are here. I am and you are.” Alex shoved her shoulder, gripping the material of Kara’s t-shirt. “I know what you’re thinking and you’re wrong. You’re my sister exactly as I remember you and I am your sister. Whatever ridiculous universe ending cataclysmic events happen, don’t matter as long as we have each other.”

“I needed that.” Kara chuckled wetly.

“I know. Stop being such a doofus and just come talk to me.”

“Y’know that goes both ways, right? You shoulda told me about Maggie.”

Alex pulled Kara back into a tight hug, squeezing her tight. “Yeah, I should have,” she mumbled into her shoulder.” She pushed back from Kara, eyes searching Kara’s own. She curled her hand round the back of Kara’s neck, the other gripping her shoulder. “We’ve always got each other. Mom’s still here, we’ve got Kelly and Nia and Brainy, J’onn when he gets back. We’re all here. It’s about spending the time we have with the people that we love. The people that make us happy. And about William.” Alex blew out a breath. “So this universe made him less of a dick. That’s a good thing. It’s okay for you to take it slow with him, you don’t have to treat every date with him like you suddenly have to make a decision about whether your gonna marry him. Just take it one date at a time and have fun. Right!” Alex jumped up from the couch. “I am going to wash my face and then how about we order pizza and watch a couple of movies?”

“Ooh, Wizar-”

“Not the Wizard of Oz.”

“Boo.” Kara pouted, looking back over the couch as Alex disappeared behind the curtain heading towards the bathroom. Kara looked at her phone on the table. It was about spending time with the people she loved who made her happy. She swallowed down her nerves and grabbed her phone, typed out and sent the message before she could talk herself out of it. She exhaled, felt the tension lesson in her chest. Her phone vibrated in her hand and glanced down, surprised to see a reply from Lena.

 ** _[Kara]_** _u ok?_

 ** _[Lena]_** _I’m okay. Staying with Andrea._

 ** _[Lena]_** _Are you alright? That looked like quite the fight._

Kara smiled hesitantly at this brief, utterly normal interaction. She risked a look over her shoulder to make sure Alex wasn’t on her way back then typed out her reply.

 ** _[Kara]_** _I’m ok. Been a while since I got the chance to fight like that. Was a bit like a work out_

Her phone vibrated again, a text from an unknown number flashing up on her screen.

 ** _[Unknown]_** _This is Andrea. Lena is fine stop bothering her._

Kara blinked down at the screen, shocked. Then she burst out onto peals of laughter, rolling over onto her side. 

“Double order of pizza is on its way,” Alex said, walking back into the room, phone in hand. She stopped when she saw Kara doubled over in the middle of a giggling fit. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing.” Kara wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Just Andrea being Andrea.”

She didn’t have that kind of relationship with Andrea and knew, without a shadow of a doubt that Andrea wouldn’t be amused, and she would absolutely hear about it tomorrow at work, but she sent back a frowny face.

 ** _[Lena]_** _I’m glad you’re alright._

 ** _[Kara]_** _same_

 ** _[Kara]_** _like I mean im glad ur alright too_

 ** _[Kara]_** _sorry_

 ** _[Kara]_** _night_

 ** _[Lena]_** _Goodnight Kara_

“So what’re we watching?” Kara leaned against Alex, tucking her phone down between the couch cushions.

“Die Hard,” Alex replied. She picked up the remote and flicked on the TV.

“Noooooo,” Kara whined. “Let’s watch something fun.”

“Die Hard is fun,” she said. But when she put Netflix on she picked a random comedy and settled back against the couch.

Kara smiled, softly and warmly. Time with the people she loved and cared about, the people who made her happy. She knew what she had to do, and there should perhaps have been a squirm of trepidation or guilt, but instead now that she had made the decision she felt a weight lifting from her shoulders, the loosening of a knot of tension she hadn’t realised was there.

She was going to break up with William.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the last of the Lena-lite chapters.


End file.
